Progress and Completion

Posted by Chris Wall on October 25, 2010 Comments Off

Driving home every day, I pass this house.
There is nothing special about the house, just a regular unassuming little place, with a mildly unkempt garden.
Still, the house itself is irrelevant, what is of note, was the fence, or rather the building of the fence.

To begin with there was just the house and it’s mildly unkempt garden. Then day by day, small changes appeared, by small, I mean tiny, literally one post a day would go up. Then once the posts had been placed, the panels between each post were placed in.
I looked forward to driving past the house everyday, seeing a little more progress, each day getting more of a hint of what the final picture would be.
I knew eventually this slow evolution of fence would come to its completion, and there would be no more changes to look forward to. Yet, yesterday afternoon, when all the posts erected, all the panels attached and the final coat of paint had gone on, I couldn’t help but feel slightly disappointed. » Read more…

The Registry and WoW64

Posted by Chris Wall on October 22, 2010 0 comments

I was doing some programming recently and had to store some values in that behemoth that is the windows registry, usually that’s pretty straight forward, not so much this time.

Windows has this little system (WoW64: windows on windows 64bit) that lets you run 64 and 32 bit processes at the same time, it is basically an emulator that wraps up the 32bit processes in their own address space (if I understand correctly). This is all fine, except that in order to do so, they have separated out the registry so that 32bit processes running on a 64bit machine will be sent off to a totally different key to get their values.

Thanks to the powers of the internet and a ‘Vadim’, I discovered why all my reg keys kept disappearing on my clients server.

Below is the link to the article that solved the problem for me
WoW64 and the registry. « Vadim’s Weblog.

Thanks Vadim.

Visual Studio 2010: comboboxes and databinding

Posted by Chris Wall on October 6, 2010 0 comments

In .net the combo box control is useful for providing a set list of data for your end users to choose from e.g. State, street type, gender.

The problem with the implementation provided to you in .net,
is that if you want to provide the user with a nicely readable name,
yet return some horribly mangled value for your back-end to play with,
the process involved is a little less than straight forward.

There are three ways to provide data to a combo boxes drop down list, » Read more…

Disable Windows Server “enhanced security”

Posted by Chris Wall on October 4, 2010 0 comments

the Windows Server operating system always had an annoying little feature “Internet Explorer Enhanced security”.
Sure, it makes good sense to restrict what end users can do on your terminal server, but when your server is just for the admins, its becomes a bit of a pain in the bum.

So here’s how you turn it off… » Read more…