Kent J. Chen's WebLog

I was preparing my development environment on my Windows 7 yesterday. I loaded Visual Studio 2008, enabled IIS, and pointed it to my apps directory. All look good until I converted one app I coded before to application and tested it through my web browser.

Zoom it out to see the detail errors if you can’t read it clearly.

I then also tested a fresh built web app with default settings. It still happened the same. The link at bottom of the page points to a Microsoft KB that also didn’t seem to help.

Without…

I am not a fan of auto-response. In fact, I hate to use it for a few reasons, one of which is I am telling spamers that I am real. But this really makes me to use it now, or even more.

Hi – thank you for emailing me.

When your email arrived, I was doing one of the following: celebrating
Christmas with my family, bringing in the New Year with friends,
getting married to my favourite person in the world, flying across the
planet, navigating the Indian transport system, riding a camel around
the Arabian

…

BlogML is an open format derived from XML used mainly to store and restore the content of a blog. It was originally developed on GotDotNet community and widely supported by many .Net-based blogging tools, such as Community Server, Subtext, and dasBlog. So the chances are, if you want to move your .Net-powered blog to WordPress, BlogML is the best way to export your content out of your blog and import them into WordPress.

But the problem is WordPress doesn’t support BlogML out of the box.

So in order to be able to import the BlogML file exported from…

I am not a huge fan of these portable keyboard but it’s nice to have it. Hocking up a keyboard to your iPhone wirelessly via Bluetooth should make more convenient for you.

However, it requires you to jailbreak your iPhone first.

The Bluetooth Keyboard Driver, just released in Cydia, fills this void for jailbroken iPhone users. The App is based on the open-source BTstack project, which also brought us the Wii Mote to work with apps like emulators. This driver runs on all iDevices with Bluetooth support. It is unclear yet, if it works properly

…

If you have a website that you constantly access on your iPhone, it would be nice to have a shortcut on the iPhone’s homepage that redirect you to the website. With the new firmware 3.0, you actually can do that, quite easily.

First, click Add button while you are in the webpage that you want to bookmark, which brings up 3 options for you to choose. Pick Add to Home Screen, the one in blue.

And type in the description in the next window,

Once you click Add button, you will see a new icon…

ManagePC is an open source .Net application that makes easy for you to manage your PC in your Windows environment. The tool inventories all aspects of PCs on your domain including:

• hardware
• services
• software
• hot-fixes
• processes
• local users and groups
• group policies
• etc.

What’s nice is that the tool also allows you to take control of PCs through familiar interfaces. Use remote desktop, VNC, reboot, start/stop service, uninstall software and more directly from the tool.

It’s definitely worth checking out.

[via 4sysops]

The new combination of Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 makes a lot of new things that are impossible to do in the previous versions possible. Offline domain join is one of them. It becomes possible because of the new command tool, djoin.exe, that comes with the system. Actually, what makes more interesting is that it doesn’t require Windows Server 2008 R2 as domain controller on your network. However, because the tool is made in Windows 7, it may not work in any previous windows.

Michael Pietroforte at 4sysops wrote two great posts, here and

I am not among those experienced DBAs. I am just a regular geek who knows basic skills of managing database server and a bit of database programming. I haven’t really got into Oracle world but have heard from many sources that Oracle database is way better than MS SQL because such, such reasons. And I have been wondering if that’s all true.

Here, Pinal Dave at SQLAuthority posted an article that outlines a number of reasons why people think that way and why they are not the case, and concluded that

I hope this article helps to debunk the myth

…

If you have a blog and use FeedBurner burn your RSS feed, you may like this new approach FeedBurner recently added.

Log into your FeedBurner account and go to Publicize tab, you will notice a new category listed at the left sidebar named Socialize, just under the FeedCount. What this new thing does right now is that once it’s enabled FeedBurner will automatically post updates from your feed to your social media account, though Twitter is the only one supported at the moment.

Clicking Add a Twitter account will go through Twitter’s oauth authentication process to verify your…

Hyper-V or vSphere? For virtualization fans (me included) who are always wondering who’s better, here is a head-to-head unbiased mapping of Microsoft and VMware virtualization solutions offered by WindowsITPro, a free poster for you to download.

It’s a nice poster that provides a single source for IT decision makers and technologists to compare the two leading virtualization solutions providers.

The poster covers:

• the Platform Vision architectural model
• architectural comparison of Hyper-V and ESX 4.0
• product and positioning comparison of VMware and Microsoft
• a drilldown into server/hypervisor virtualization

This poster is in PDF format…