Windows

I wanted to get my Windows Home Server configured correctly for web so I have valid certificate by Microsoft and I can use subdomain service they are offering. As my home network is not default that is expected by Windows Home Server (no direct access to router that is connected to web) I had to trick my WHS a little bit. In this posting I will show you how to get Windows Home Server work with Microsoft address (http://something.homeserver.com) if it is not connected directly to router that has access to web.

Often asked question: is there any way to gather debug output of .NET program that is running on environment where Visual Studio is not installed? Yes, you can do it and you can do it for free with program called DebugView. Here’s how it works.

There are many programs that come with MSI installer and not every installer is free of bugs or small problems. If you are building your own installer using Visual Studio you may want to change it before publishing it to users. Here is little overview of my main free tool called Orca.

I needed some elegant method to read registry values in my Live Writer Delicious bookmarks plug-in. RegistryKey has GetValue() method but it returns values as object. I wrote generic version of GetValue() as RegistryKey extension method. It returns you specified value from key and converts it to type you ask. If conversions are not successful then default value of given type will be used.

After installing Windows Server 2008 to one of my development server I got the following error: Windows could not be activated.

Okay, my Windows Vista found its sad end couple of days ago. There was almost nothing to do without going out of sleeping time. Many broken installation packages, large amounts of space were gone somewhere, some processes ate free memory and after each 10 seconds there was 10 seconds delay because something was busy doing something. One thing more – reading and writing USB hard discs was suddenly very-very slow. So it was time to use the moment and try out something new before going back to good old Windows XP.

Windows Installer is one of my favorite problem childs - of course, when it has mysteriuos problems. I found a problem when installing Outlook add-in on machine that has no extensibility features installed on it. Something was missing and installer gave me the famous "Unable to get installer types" error. After pointless waste of time tracing installer and checking its logs I checked out what's going on in file system.