BSoD when installing Windows XP on ASUS K61IC notebook

If a bluescreen (Blue Screen of Death) occurs during Windows XP installation and the error message contains the 0x0000007B code, try to do the following:

1. restart the notebook,
2. press F2 to enter the BIOS setup,
3. go to Advanced and then IDE Configuration,
4. change the SATA Operation Mode setting to Compatible (the default setting is Enhanced).

Some information about the STOP: 0x0000007B error can be found here.

HOWTO Getting 16x16 icons for file types

1. Download this sample.

2. Put a button and a textbox on the form.

3. Use a snippet similar to:

Dim types As String() = txtFileTypes.Text.Split(",")
For i As Integer = 0 To types.GetLength(0) - 1
  Dim im As Image = _
  Me.FileSystemImages.SmallImageList.Images( _
  FileSystemImages.GetTheFileIconIndex("*." & types(i)))
  im.Save(Application.StartupPath & "\" & types(i) & ".bmp", _
  Imaging.ImageFormat.Bmp)
Next

and you have a tool that allows you to retrieve 16x16 icons for different file types.

Clipboard stops working while using remote desktop connection

If the clipboard suddenly stops functioning, when you are connected to a terminal server or other remote computer, you can try to do the following:

1. open Task Manager on the remote machine and kill the rdpclip.exe process;
2. start the rdpclip.exe application again (you can find it in c:\WINDOWS\system32\).

Working with multiple terminal sessions simultaneously

If you often work with many terminal sessions opened in the same time, you should try Terminals.

My two favourite features of Terminals are:

1. the tabbed view of the sessions that helps to unclutter the taskbar,
2. the ability to create Favorites (session definitions) so I no longer need to have to store that information in separate files.

You can find some screenshots here.

HOWTO: Configure SQL Server 2005 to allow remote connections

I know it doesn't seem a very hard task, but it really took me quite a lot of time to configure a SQL Server 2005 instance running on Windows XP SP2 machine to allow remote connections.

This KB article describes step by step what you have to do to be able to connect remotely to a SQL Server 2005.

In my case, there were two problems:

1. I disabled SQL Server Browser service (which has to be running if you want to use a named instance),
2. I didn't know that in Windows Firewall you can create exceptions for particular applications (and not only ports).

HOWTO: Calculate MD5 checksum in Windows (and other checksums, too)

On Linux that's trivial - there is the md5sum program.

Windows does not come with such a tool, but you can use md5deep package.

md5deep is a cross-platform set of programs to compute MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256 Tiger, or Whirlpool message digests on an arbitrary number of files. The programs run on Windows, Linux, Cygwin, *BSD, OS X, Solaris, and should run on most other platforms. md5deep is similar to the md5sum program found in the GNU Coreutils package (...)

Debugging a Windows service

OnPause, OnContinue and OnStop methods can be debugged by simply attaching to the [WindowsServiceName].exe process and setting breakpoints in the appropriate places.

The problem gets a little bit harder when it comes to debugging OnStart method, since there is no process that can be attached to, because the service is not running. There are many ways to solve this problem, but, in my opinion, the easiest one is to
call a System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch() method within the OnStart method in order to start a debugger programmatically.

A detailed description of this problem can be found here.