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Archive for January, 2009

A thankyou to FogBugz

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009


I’ve been using FogBugz Bug tracking software extensively on my Dissertation project, to keep track of bugs, and to-do lists. It’s an excellent solution that integrates well into visual studio.

I’ve been using there free start-up/student edition, which allows up to 2 users, which has been fine for me, but I thought that it would be really useful to able to use this for bug tracking in our group work at university, but our group has 4 members. So i fired of a quick email to Fogbugz on the off chance that they might up our user limit as we’re poor students. Bit cheeky I know, but worth a go. I received an email back 10 minutes later saying they would gladly up or limit to 4, till then end of our studies and with a genuine interest in the work we were doing

Now I know they definitely have some commercial interest in getting more students to us their product, so that when they leave University, they will use it in commercial ventures, but still it was nice to find a company that were willing to do that, and who were interested in what we were using their product for.
So, a big thank you to Fogbugz, and a suggestion to any students that need bug tracking for their projects, taking a look at Fogbugz might not be a bad idea!

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Windows 7 on a Macbook Pro

Thursday, January 15th, 2009


So I decided today was the day to install Windows 7 on my Bootcamp partition. I’ve been having issues with Office not running on my Vista install and then today Visual Studio starting having errors, so the easiest solution was a re-install.

Installation of Windows was exactly the same as the Vista install, bar a few logo changes. Took about 45 minutes, so not bad at all. Once installed, I popped in the Leopard CD, it ran setup and installed the drivers, and done, no drivers missing, no conflicts, all done.

While it does look very similar to Vista, it does have a few obvious changes, the new superbar replaces the standard startmenu and is graphically pleasing if nothing else. I’ve not had allot of time on it yet, but it does seem to be noticeably quicker than Vista, the opening of windows seems snappier.

I’ve installed most of the software I need and had very few issues. I did initialy had a problem getting an application for mounting ISO images to work, magic ISO didn’t work, nor did ISO burn, but in the end I managed to get SlySoft’s clone drive to work, but that only installed after I disabled system restore. Other than that, so far no issues. Will update if any issues come up.

Tags: ,

Posted in Windows | 1 Comment »


Moving Organizational Units in powershell

Monday, January 12th, 2009


It turns out that whilst you can happily create a new mailbox in any OU you want, you cannot then move it to a different OU using the set-mailbox command. In fact what you have to do, is move the base Active Directory object. To do this you need to know (or work out) the distinguished name of both the user you are trying to move, and the OU you are trying to move it to. You then use the MoveTo method of the PSBase Object to move it. The code to do this looks like this:

</span>

<span> "$from=[ADSI] 'LDAP://&lt;DIstinguisedNameOfUser&gt;'"</span>

<span>"$to=[ADSI] 'LDAP://'&lt;DistinguisedNameofOUToMoveTo&gt;"</span>

<span> "$from.PSBase.MoveTo($to)"</span>

<span>

On a side not. The PSBase object, basically gives you access to the underlying Powershell Object, not the specialised version for a user, mailbox etc. A good explanation is available here.

http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2006/11/24/what-s-up-with-psbase-psextended-psadapted-and-psobject.aspx

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Posted in University, Windows | No Comments »


Singleton per ASP.net Session

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009


A class in my current project is accessed multiple times in a session, and stores error messages that need to be read by multiple classes, so I wanted to make this class a singleton. However a singleton in asp.net is then available to the whole application, not something I want, as error messages are per user. So after some experimenting, I came up with a simple way to make your singleton session bound.

instance method of singleton:

public singleton Instance
{
get
{
string name = "singleton";

if (HttpContext.Current.Session[name] == null)
HttpContext.Current.Session[name] = new MyClass();

return (singleton)HttpContext.Current.Session[name];
}
}


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Posted in University | No Comments »