CREATE BLOG dbo.SqlServer

So this morning, I am at least two things: (1) angry, and (2) fed up. I record my videos on Vista because I want the videos to have the new and fresh look and feel but that's it - I'm going back to Windows XP (and not for the first time). This morning when I logged into my recording machine, it tells me that I might be the victim of software counterfeiting! Oh noes!

LearnItFirst.com is a Microsoft Certified Partner so we have licenses to spare but, since they only give us one key, it gets used on multiple machines - this is common for licensing and not the problem. The problem is that, over the past two years, I've installed Vista on probably ten different machines - virtual machines or "real" machines - and then wiped Vista away because it was awful. Vista has only stayed on two actual machines. So now, the MSFT licensing system thinks I'm a pirate arrrrrr...

I have the same licensing issue with Office 2007 now as well. I've installed Vista, used the product key (and activated it), and then had to uninstall for whatever reason. Of course I installed and activated Office 2007 as well...

Would Microsoft give me my licenses back if I called them? Probably. But from now on I'll have to call in and enter - not kidding - a 45-character provided key and then receive a 45-character product key in return (make no typos!).

No thanks - I just don't need Vista or its headaches that bad. Arrrggh - I'm so fed up with the licensing schemes. I buy a new computer for $1200 and it includes a Windows Vista Home license. I immediately throw that away by installing Vista Ultimate on top of it - one license (Home version) paid for and dumped. Since I've actually bought three PCs, I've purchased three Windows Vista Home version licenses and would up not using them in favor of trying Windows Vista Ultimate. When that doesn't work, I've now burned through (apparently) ten Windows Vista Ultimate licenses.

Back to Windows XP. I have plenty, plenty of licenses and less hassle.

Arrrrrrrrrrr - I'm no pirate but MSFT makes me appreciate the pirates for sure!

# posted by Scott Whigham @ 6:06 AM 1 comments links to this post

Wow - I read some very sad news this morning: the great Ken Henderson passed away this past Sunday. Ken Henderson was the author of the famous "The Guru's Guide" series and honestly, if it wasn't Ken's insights and his ability to "simplify the complicated", I would not have had such a rewarding career. Ken was truly an inspiration for me and the world will definitely not be a better place without him. I never was fortunate enough to meet Ken in person but he sure came across as a nice person in his blog and his books.

Looks like the news outlets are slow to pick this up as well - Google News only has one article as of this writing (http://news.google.com/news?q=%22ken+henderson%22) - although the blogging world is mourning his loss.

Thank you, Ken.

# posted by Scott Whigham @ 7:58 AM 0 comments links to this post

I've been using Captcha Control by Jeff Atwood (the brilliant mind behind from CodingHorror.com) for a little over a year now on my sites and I've been very happy with it. In case you don't know what a captcha is, a captcha is an acronym (often seen CAPTCHA) which stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". People like me use captchas on signup/etc pages to stop automated scripts/bots from submitting information (such as spam on a forum).

Like I said, I've used Jeff Atwood's freely available Captcha Control (get it here) for a while here on our sites and been happy with it. It is solvable so it isn't 100% foolproof (judging by the automated signups I get) but it probably stops 99.9% of the spam. But it has one recognized problem - if you are visually impaired, it stops you more effectively than it does the spammers. Yikes - not what I wanted :( You see, Captcha Control doesn't feature an audio-only version of the captcha; if you can't read the already-hard-to-read letters, you can't register (or, in my case, download a free video since I use captchas to protect our bandwidth). I've gotten a few comments/emails/phone calls in the past month from people who wanted to download a free video but they were unable to solve the captcha and thus weren't able to download. So I began the hunt for a new captcha engine.

First question I had to solve is the, "Is it better to buy/use third party or build it myself?" Easy - buy. Building and maintaining a captcha engine is tough and requires insane algorithm knowledge - I had no intention of building. Next question - who to use? I ultimately settled on reCAPTCHA (get it here) which is FREE, thus making it quite attractive :)

What I like about reCAPTCHA (other than the cost) is that it is sooooooo easy to use both as a developer and as a user. It has tougher-than-average captchas to solve, it features audio captchas, and lastly it is a community effort - solving captchas with reCAPTCHA actually goes to a good cause. From their website:

    About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books...

    ... how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Very cool - we all want to help out, right?

Tomorrow I'll record a series of videos on how to add captchas - both Jeff Atwood's control and reCAPTCHA - to your ASP.NET applications but, in case anyone is paying attention, I wanted to give you a heads-up and let you play with the captchas on the sites. If you want to try them out, just append "/FreeVideos/" onto the end of any of our domain names like this:

    * http://www.learnsqlserver.com/FreeVideos/
    * http://www.learnsharepoint.com/FreeVideos/
    * http://www.learnexchange.com/FreeVideos/
    * etc....

Let me know how you like it by dropping me a line through our Contact Us page here!

# posted by Scott Whigham @ 4:34 PM 0 comments links to this post

If you've watched my videos and/or read some of my other posts, you'll likely remember that I'm an RSS junkie - can't live without it. My feed reader of choice is Newsgator's FeedDemon - and they just announced that it is now FREE. I paid about $30 for it 3-4 years ago (back when Nick Bradbury was sole owner) and it was money well spent. Now that it's free, I hope more folks will learn of the goodness that is RSS :)

Download it here - http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/free-demon-yes.html

Here's a few of my favorite feeds to get you started:

General Tech:

• Slashdot Developers
• Valleywag
• DotNetJunkies.com
• Mary Jo Foley's blog

SQL Based

• Bob Beauchamin's blog
• Kalen Delaney's blog
• Ken Henderson's blog
• Adam Machanic's blog
• Jamie Thompson's SSIS blog

.NET Based

• Roy Osherove's blog
• Jesse Ezell's blog
• Jon Galloway's blog
• CodingHorror
• Scott Mitchell's blog
• Scott Guthrie's blog
• Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen

Here's How I "Do" RSS

RSS, to me, is a lot like data mining - unless you have a lot of data to work with, it's not that useful. What I like to do is to collect tons and tons of feeds (organized into categories) and I have FeedDemon set to update all of my feeds every 5-10 minutes. I have about 1,600 feeds right now in my OPML file that I am monitoring every 5-10 minutes - yikes! That means that, every time any one of the 1,600 feeds posts a new entry, FeedDemon downloads it and I can view it inside FeedDemon - without having to go to that website.

But that's too much info to be useful, isn't it?

Yes. Sometimes I forget to open FeedDemon and, if it goes 2-3 days without launching, I'll have 1,500-2,000 new articles to read. Forget that - you'll never care about or read 1,500-2,000 articles 2-3 days.

So what do you do?

Watches Are the Key to Using FeedDemon Effectively (IMO)

Here's what I do:

1. I go collect a ton of RSS feeds about a particular topic (Audio Visual - TVs and Stereos, for example)
2. Create a watch that looks for certain keywords
1. Sharp Aquos
2. 1080p
3. free dvd
3. Sync the feeds every 10 minutes
4. Configure FeedDemon to notify me via a popup whenever someone has been added to the watch

The better your watches, the better you'll enjoy FeedDemon. The more feeds you have, the more you'll likely enjoy FeedDemon. One word of caution: some sites are duplicates and post duplicate stories. This can lead to duplicates showing up in your watches. So look for that and prune your feed list periodically.

Go download FeedDemon and get started with it - it's awesome!

http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/free-demon-yes.html

# posted by Scott Whigham @ 8:54 AM 1 comments links to this post

So, in an effort to improve my Vista experience, I downloaded the RC1 for Vista Service Pack 1 and installed it (in less than two hours). However, now all of my Microsoft.Office.Interop DLLs that referenced in my SSIS packages are no longer "visible" by SSIS :( That's right - installing Vista SP1 somehow made a change that made it difficult (if not impossible - problem is still not solved) to use the primary interop assemblies in Vista with SSIS. Believe me - it worked before installing Vista SP1 RC1 but it doesn't work after. When I go into the SSIS Script Designer, it shows me that the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel assembly (for example) is referenced properly (on the left side of the screenshot below) but you can also see that VSA doesn't recognize Excel.Application, Excel.Workbook, or Excel.Worksheet ("Excel" is aliased to Imports Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel).

Now, when I right click on the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel reference and select Properties, you get misinformation:

The next logical step was to remove the reference and add it back. Fine - tried that... But the Microsoft.Office.* assemblies do not show up in the list of available assemblies :(  I've done the obvious - I've verified that the Interop DLLs are in the "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn" folder and that they are in the GAC. See?

I need some help - I'll be sure to post back here with the resolution and/or change required. In the meantime, if you know of the reason for this, please let me know in the comments.

# posted by Scott Whigham @ 10:46 AM 1 comments links to this post

Check it out - MSFT has given us the latest posters for the .NET Framework (available here). If you plan on getting ready/migrating to .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, you'll want to get in on this while available.

Link: .NET 3.5 Framework Posters

# posted by Scott Whigham @ 1:33 PM 0 comments links to this post

I did it! I'm sooooo happy :) No more of the crap Outlook 2007 junk mail and I don't have to deal with how crappy my ISP's spam filter is anymore - I *finally* configured SpamBayes successfully for Outlook 2007 (running on Windows XP and Windows 2003).

If you're tried to use Spambayes in Outlook 2007, you've likely gotten the "Cannot load Spambayes add-in" error:

• There was an error initializing the SpamBayes addin. Please restart Outlook and try again
• Com add-in load errors
• ImportError: DLL load failed
• The Spambayes toolbar shows up but doesn't work
• Registered: SpamBayes.OutlookAddin  Registration complete. (but it doesn't really work)
• Outlook experienced a serious problem with the 'spambayes' add-in. (and then disables the Spambayes add-in)

I tried re-installing Outlook 2007, I tried reinstalling Spambayes but nothing worked :( I finally found a couple of places on the web that point to solutions for Outlook 2003 that, if I applied them to Outlook 2007, they finally worked. Here's what you need to know:

1. First,you want to visit the Spambayes FAQs and particularly you want to read the one about turning off DEP protection (here)
2. Second, you'll want to download the latest release of Spambayes - as of this writing, it is 1.1a4 (available from sourceforge here)

To get it to work:

• Install Spambayes using a default installation
• Before launching Outlook 2007, add Outlook to your DEP protection
• On Windows XP/2003, right click on My Computer and select Properties. Click the Advanced tab and then the Settings button under the Performance panel. Click the Data Execution Prevention tab and then add the Outlook executable to the list.
• I think this is all you need but, as a precaution, I also added the Spambayes com register exe: \Program Files\Spambayes\bin\outlook_addin_register.exe as well but I don't know if that mattered
• Launch Outlook - did it work? It should but, if it doesn't, allow Outlook to disable Spambayes and restart Outlook. Go to Tools -> Trust Center -> Add-Ins and look for "Manage" at the bottom of that page.
• Select "Com Add-Ins" in the drop down and hit the Go button
• Remove the Spambayes Add-in and add it back (found at \Program Files\Spambayes\bin\outlook_addin.dll)

Did it work? Worked for me and that makes me oh so happy! Boo MSFT for releasing such a crappy junk mail engine with no improvements. Boo Microsoft for making Outlook 2007 actually worse for junk mail than Outlook 2003. Boo Spambayes team for not upgrading/updating the website to work with Outlook 2007. Yay Spambayes team for totally rocking in every other aspect lol.

I hope this helps you - drop a line and let me know if it does or doesn't work for you.

# posted by Scott Whigham @ 7:15 AM 2 comments links to this post