Bill Robertson's Blog : Microsoft

Please fix Visual Studio F1 key press

Bill Robertson — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 10:02:00 GMT

I just spent 2 minutes of my life waiting for my computer to respond and started this blog post before I could go back to work. I hit F2 trying to rename a file in my solution, but studio quit responding. I started getting more and more frustrated that studio died. I had some unsaved files (yes my problem) and didn't want to lose them.

The the screen flashed and "Initializing Help" came up. Ah yes, the accidental F1 key press that locks studio down why the integrated help is activated. OMG. Google is a better "help" than studio has to offer. I could reassign that keypress to something innocuous, but I've finally learned to live with the studio default keys. It makes it easier going to someone else's machine.

I've been spending a lot of time lately writing javascript and would kill for an intellisense engine. It's like programming back in my hobby days writing code in notepad...or actually VI because Linux had "gcc" built into the OS. The Orcas Studio demos I've seen were impressive for javascript intellisense. I hope Orcas solves the frozen-Studio-accidental-F1-keypress-malevolent-joke.

Sql 2005 Import Data From Excel Problem

Bill Robertson — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 20:23:06 GMT

I'd always stayed away from the import wizard in Sql 2005 Management Studio. One, because I really liked the importing functionality in Sql 2000; I could sail through it with little effort (or thought). Two, I've changed jobs and don't have to import many excel files into Sql.

Finally, I pulled some production logs and they came in as an excel sheet. I didn't want to work with 100MB excel file and try to find information in it so I wanted to import it into Sql so I could run queries on it. I tried importing plain jane style into a table and received this error message"

There was an error with output column "pathandquery" (45) on output "Excel Source Output" (9). The column status returned was: "Text was truncated or one of more characters had no match in the target code page."

I tried changing the target destination table for all the columns to be ntext, but I still had the same error message to deal with. I did some yahooing (hey, if google is a verb...) and came across this knowledge base article:

PRB: Transfer of Data from Jet 4.0LEDB Source Fails with Buffer Overflow Error

By default the Jet provider will only read the first 8 rows to set up its internal buffer for transferring data to sql. The first 8 rows of my datasource were small, but some of the later rows have large amounts of text in the column. When it reached those, the buffer blew chunks and was unable to recover. I guess it beats an unhandled buffer overflow error that can be exploited, yah Microsoft.

You need to make a modification to the registry to change the behavior.

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines\Excel\TypeGuessRows

The default value is 8. The KB article said the range of valid values is 0 to 16. If you set it to zero, it will scan 16,384 rows, slowing down the import process. I changed my value to 0; it was a little slower, but it worked.

Bill's sage coding advice: Slow and works is ALWAYS better than fast and broken.

Internet Explorer and the Backspace key

Bill Robertson — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 21:57:00 GMT

I just lost 20 minutes worth of work because of a problem I've had with IE for the longest time. I fully understand that some people use the backspace key as the back button when navigating the Internet, but I have never wanted to use it that way. I've hit the backspace many, many, many times, but never, ever, ever wanted it to go "back".

I was filling out my Time card for last week (yes it was Due on Monday) and was half way through with it. I clicked inside the hour box to change one of my tasks and hit backspace. You can save me the lecture on only use delete; I use them both interchangeably. I must not have clicked inside the textbox because when I hit backspace my browser flashed and it went back to the previous page.

I clicked forward, strange the forwardspace key doesn't move forward...oh wait, that moves you down the page. That is another great and usable feature. Scoff! When the page reloaded from me hitting forward, all of my changes were lost. I'm sure the web developers could do something to keep my changes when the page reloaded, but damn...I'm the dolt that left the page.

Please oh please IE team, enable as an option to TURN OFF the backspace as a back button ~~bug~~ feature with IE. There is already a keyboard shortcut for moving back. alt->[left arrow]. At least that one makes sense because the inverse operation alt->[right arrow] moves forward and not down the page...

[Update: Thanks for Bob's constructive criticism, I actually had to look at the keyboard to see what key my mental memory was pressing.]

Searching Outlook Emails

Bill Robertson — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 23:32:00 GMT

Outlook has always crawled when searching for emails. It probably would be faster to export mail to a .csv file, open it in notepad, and find what you are looking for then using the built in Search ~~mistake~~ feature. I came across Lookout. It was an outlook plug-in that worked amazing well. Search a year worth of emails in about a second, great!

Lookout was such a great tool and I have been using it for 3 years now, I went to their site to see if it was open source(ish) or had a plug in model. One of the problems I have up at work is most of my older emails are sitting on a PST file on my computer. When I am at home and need to jump on a production server, I go to my emails to look for the credentials.

However, I don't have access to the emails. I wanted to create a extension to Lookout so I could search from my home computer (using the fancy web services) and return a list of mail items to me so I could get the information from my PST. Of course I google for the site because I know what it is called and clicked on the first item returned. Next thing I know I'm looking at the Windows Desktop Search page.

Whoa, that's horrible. Finally I've experienced a case where Microsoft purchases a good piece of software and buries it. I've heard the rumors of this happening where highly useful software disappears into the Vault at Microsoft. It appears Microsoft bought lookout so they could use them to integrate into the Desktop search.

Well, that isn't going to work for me. As all good computer geeks do, it is coming close to time for me to reinstall my machine. That has been put on hold until I can find the Lookout plug in. I'm not going to redo my machine and loose the ability to search emails. Yes, that software is that good. I'll trade the slow boot up time for the impossibly slow Outlook searching.

I just want simple software that will search my emails. I don't yet want a Microsoft worm crawling my machine indexing all my documents. That day will probably come, but there is no need for it yet. I just want to search emails.

Xander up at work was kind enough to send me his old zip file for the install, but I found out that Outlook 2007 specifically prohibits Lookout from being installed on top of Outlook. I have since saved it for posterity, so if anyone is looking for it, shoot me a message.

Bad Microsoft...if you are going to take away a feature, then you should at least offer a compatible replacement.