Best feature of Windows 7 ???

Recently setup W7 on my lappy (Toshiba P10).

Installation is quite simple, however getting the drivers (most of which are BETA) is a bit painful.

The best feature I have found so far is the mouse-over on the active windows on the task bar.

I dont recall Vista having anything like this?

When you mouse over an application the task bar, the thumbnails of the windows popup, and when you mouse over one of the thumbnails, all the other windows become transparent except for the moused-over application's window.

I think that is a great feature!

Using ROWNUMBER() to sort views!

Had a bit of an epiphany today when creating a view.

I needed to be able to join the view back on itself to create a running total column. In order to do this I thought I would use ROWNUMBER() to create a key and join on values less than that key.

In doing so I realised that ROWNUMBER() allows you to create a sorted view. This is something that anyone who has tried to create a sorted view will know can not be done unless you use a SELECT TOP statement, which is cludgey.

Using a " SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY field1, field2, field3) AS 'ROWNUMBER', field1, field2, field3 ... FROM ... WHERE ... " statement however has the effect of sorting the values and you can use this to create a sorted view.

i.e.

CREATE VIEW vwTestView AS

SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY field1, field2, field3) AS 'ROWNUMBER', field1, field2, field3 ... FROM ...

WHERE ...

Obviously this is only good if you are able to put the field in the view without upsetting anybody. But if you can it works well.

mailto: link in a HTML Popup

Today I had to use a HTML Popup to display some person details, including and email address.

To get the email link to launch a new email window I thought I could just insert the mailto: markup into the anchor in the popup body, however it did not respond.

I found that to get this to work I needed to insert my popup content into a DIV, pass the DIV content as the content for the popup body, and have the onclick event on the mail address anchor make a call to get the parent window to navigate to the mailto: URL.

All a bit cludgey, but it worked in the end. The resulting HTML looked like this:

<DIV id="data1" style="display:none">

<SPAN onclick="javascript:parent.window.navigate('mailto:xxxxxx@xxxx.xxx.xx')">

<B>Email:</B><a href="#" >xxxxxx@xxxx.xxx.xx</a></SPAN>

<BR> ... more HTML ...

</DIV>

<a href="#" onclick="javascript:

var oPopup = window.createPopup();

var oPopBody = oPopup.document.body;

oPopBody.style.backgroundColor = 'lightyellow';

oPopBody.style.border = 'solid black 1px';

oPopBody.innerHTML = data1.innerHTML;

oPopup.show(0, 16, 350, 75, event.srcElement);" style="text-decoration:none" >...</a>

Recently had to get a Telstra 21 3g card working with a Netcomm 3G wireless router N3G002W.

There were some hassles getting it all configured but the in the end it DOES WORK!

So the things to look for are:

• Dont turn off the radio when you disconnect the dongle from your pc. I just pulled it out to make sure. The option in the bigpond connection manager app to close and exit I think turns of the radio.
• Press and hold the SHIFT key when clicking on the OPTIONS in the telstra bigpond connection manager app. This gives you some extra tabs in the options dialog. Click the checkbox in one of the new tabs that says that the device is already registered.
• use telstra.bigpond as the APN, and put in the username and password. Other default settings worked fine.

Did not really see any speed increase over the 7.2 where I was though (country area) !

While trying to customise one of the themes from the TenThemesForSharePoint pack I found that whenever I modified and deployed the theme.css file and deployed, the changes did not take effect.

To get the changes to take effect I needed to open the browser, navigate to the sharepoint site, then go to Site Actions > Site Settings > Site Features and then Deactivate the theme, and then Re-Activate it. The new theme.css would then be applied. Additionally, sometimes I would need to press the Refresh button on the browser!

While trying to deploy themes using the TenThemesForSharePoint pack I kept on getting this error.

• Error 1 The content type text/html; charset=utf-8 of the response message does not match the content type of the binding (text/xml; charset=utf-8). If using a custom encoder, be sure that the IsContentTypeSupported method is implemented properly. The first 1024 bytes of the response were: ...'

What I found was I needed to manually navigate to the VseWSS WCF service on my Sharepoint server to have it loaded, and then do the deploy. To do this, open a browser window and navigate to "http://yourserver:1378/SPService.svc"

This should open the service page with the link to the WSDL and some sample code. It also loads the service so the deploy can now run.

well, I thought I'd start a blog about all the tech problems that I seem to have to solve in my day-to-day work life.

I worked through some issues deploying some sharepoint themes today and I thought 'this is what I am always doing', and that some of the solutions I find would be helpful for others. So I should write a blog.

And here it is.

I'll post some solutions to me problems soon.

Hope it helps someone else.

Cheers

BB