I will be presenting one or more .NET Development topics for the upcoming SQL Saturday in Pensacola on June 6th. The Gulf Coast .NET User Group (UG) that I run is working with the SQL Server UG in Pensacola. Registration is ongoing we should have a great turnout and great content.

Back in the days for NT there was and and administration service kit that contained a new DOS command called ‘kill.exe’.  This executable would shutdown any application, including those you could not close through task manager.

Today, I had an application that would not close and I was looking for a similar application on XP. I discovered that MS did a great thing and included the program, albeit with a name change, in the OS.

You can use ‘TaskKill.exe’ with a number of switches /F = force /T = tree to clean up evil applications that won’t close.  There are two primary methods:

Process ID - To determine the process id in TaskMgr you will need to open TaskMgr on the menu choose View - Select Columns- Select ‘PID’ from list. Now all applications/tasks will have a PID listed.

> TaskKill.exe /PID 111 /F /T

Application Name - Simply use the application name in the command. This will kill all instances.

>TaskKill.exe Outlook.exe /F /T

I used /F = force and /T = tree options because if I need to go through this much effort to close an application the damned thing should die a painful death.

They’ve done it again! Somehow this section seems to be a Google advertising machine. This though time though it’s only 90% Google, such an improvement.

I first noticed this on Dec 30, 2008 in this blog post.

 

Posted my Annual Free Software Advice last December and despite a wild year in Microsoft development technologies, I don’t have a major updates to this list other than:

• Vista is a solid OS now. It will take more resources then XP and will take you a while to get use to it, but I don’t know of any reason the average home user could not use it. I would not upgrade a current XP computer to Vista, but I also would not downgrade a brand new Vista machine to XP unless I had a specific reason. Bottom line if you buy a new PC use Vista.
• Keep in mind Windows 7 will be out in late 2009.

Since I don’t have any real updates I will give out a couple free tools/web site that I like:

• Woot - they (mostly) sell one thing a day until it sells out. Great deals and very humorous product descriptions.
• Digsby - great multi-client chat tool (AOL-MSN-Yahoo).
• Microsoft Live Search - love the artwork on this search site

Gmail is a nice web based email system, and Google Search is my default search engine (though I do like live.com for its stunning images), but has ZDNet’s editorial staff simply been replace by Google Adwords? Are there suddenly no other web technology companies in the world to report news about?

Below is a screen shot of ZDNet new’s ‘Web Technologies’ section as seen at 2:30 PM CST on 12/30/2008.

So what do you think, does Google get too much free press? Or should they change the name of the section to more reflect its preferred content.

 

A long time ago before the world of Visual Studio’s Integrated Web Server and .NET you had to test web sites a bit more “manually”. Here is one trick that is a somewhat lost art.

If you want to test your web application and/or web service (very handy trick for web services)  for some reason you need it to be at a specific URL, such as http://www.testingURL.com. You will need to assign a separate IP address for your web site/webservice.

On windows servers and desktops, you can modify the “hosts” file (note there is no file extension). If you have not modified this file it should look like the following:

# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a ‘#’ symbol.
#
# For example:
#
#      102.54.94.97     rhino.acme.com          # source server
#       38.25.63.10     x.acme.com              # x client host

127.0.0.1       localhost

To add a new entry simply type the ip address of the actual location of the test web site/web service you are working with (ex.  222.22.22.222). And then type the “fake” name of the URL (ex. testingURL.com)

With the above information your entry into the “hosts”:

222.22.22.222    testingURL.com

Once you save this file all requests for testingURL.com will now go to the ip address 222.22.22.222.

The beauty of this solution is that you can bind a WS call to your production web service while developing and all requests get routed to your test web service! Once in production, all the calls will be routed to your production web server.

On Windows 2003 and XP the “hosts” file is located at -  C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc

Had a great day on Saturday learning new skills and mingling with my peers at the Tallahassee Code camp. Thank you Capitol City .NET User Group for putting on such a great program.

I hope to work with you soon to get some speakers over to your user group and to bring in you presenters as well.

Hello and welcome to my Bit-Wizards blog. I have had a blog on my personal site at codepagoda.com for some time now. I am looking forward to branching out and doing a bit more writing here for Bit-Wizards specific topics.

I am Kevin Grohoske (grow-how-ski). I am a Senior Software Engineer here at Bit-Wizards Custom Software Solutions. I have been developing since I was 11 years old when my older brother brought home a Timex Sinclair 1000. Professionally, I started developing business applications while in the Army at Fort Hood. I later left the military and began developing and consulting within the civilian business sector in Dayton/Cincinnati area. I have mostly developed large enterprise applications including: electronic commerce backends, order management, intranet business applications. Much of that experience was Microsoft centric, but I have experience with Oracle, Sybase, Java, Application Servers, Eclipse IDE, Javascript, Unix, and other technologies.

I am currently the President of the local .NET Users Group, which is a non-profit organization that helps developers or potential developers learn about Microsoft development tools, technologies, and architecture. 

I love my role here at Bit-Wizards because it gives me an opportunity to be involved in multiple projects, roles, and contribute to the overall success of our company.

I hope you follow my blog here. My goal is to keep our partners informed and introduce technologies and approaches that we find interesting. If you have questions, comments, or need additional information please feel free to contact me.

Best regards,

Kevin Grohoske

 

 

   

 

 

We use a custom exception handler which utilizes the MS Enterprise Library Exception Block. I recently had an ASP.NET page I was testing that failed a test and I received “Inaccessible logs: Security Error” message.

Problem:

Root problem is the first time a ASP.Net application attempts to write to the Event Log an exception type for that application is created. In this case the Application Pool was running as the “NetworkService” identity.

Solution:

Simple fix is to change the identity that the Application Pool is running as an identity that has administrative privileges. In this case, I switched the identity to “LocalSystem”. Run the offending page again one time and the exception’s event type is created, then switch the Application Pool’s Identity back to “NetworkService”.

 

Just a quick pass through to the original blog article on the SharePoint team’s blog.

Read the article here.