Windows

In the last few weeks, I have written a good number of PowerShell scripts that accept input from the user in the form of traditional prompt boxes (e.g. in one situation, I needed the user to enter Sql connection string to execute custom actions against a database). And it appeared to me it might be useful to share the function to produce a simple prompt box in PowerShell.

So without wasting much time, here's the function:

Some weeks ago, I had installed BitVise's WinSSHD server on my primary SVN server machine to enable secure remote access. After the installation, I was noticing that WinSSHD's Control Panel would start up automatically when I login to the machine.

I was today making some changes to a web application for a client hosted on a dedicated Win 2008 server. When I tried to connect using FTP to upload my changes to the web-server, I got a:

Response: 425 Can't open data connection.
Error: Failed to retrieve directory listing

Most of us (I mean developers using SVN as version control system) at some point or the other have needed to copy a versioned folder/folders recursively to another location without those ".svn" directories being copied, right. For me, this is a pretty common task every few weeks when I backup my project files or when I need to sync source files between multiple repos in a highly distributed environment.

I am in the process of deploying an osCommerce site to a Windows 2008/IIS 7 machine as I write this (no point debating the merit of doing so, you really can't fight the management if they have taken a decision and you are not even a part of that particular decision making).

So they want a default document of let's say index.html for their website from where they want to take the user to osCommerce's main index.php based page. And I need to make the appropriate settings in web.config to have this going.

In this blog post, I present a complete framework for automatic localization in ASP.NET, ability to customize what is produced by this framework and a completely functional ASP.NET app demonstrating the features and process.

I have already been using ExtJs 4.0-Beta3 for the last couple of weeks. And an hour earlier, I occasionally went to the Sencha site to check one of my posts on the forums. And the surprise was waiting there. ExtJs 4 had been launched today.

I immediately downloaded the release version for ExtJs 4 and updated the latest build to one of my projects where I was using ExtJs 4 Beta 3. Separately, I configured the accompanying docs to run over IIS 7 on my Windows 7 machine.

Internet Explorer (IE) 8's Developer Tools seem to have a strange issue. Every once in a while, it simply refuses to show up on my screen. No matter how many times I click the Developer Tools button in IE's menu, or press F12, the tools simply wont show up on the screen.

Its more confusing because you can see the Developer Tools button in the taskbar, and clicking it multiple times gives the button focused and minimized look as happens normally when clicking taskbar buttons. But still, there's no sign of the Tools window on the screen.

Symbolic Links in Unix, Linux and derivatives are a very common and useful feature. Symbolic links in these Operating systems allow you to place links to folders or files (which can be called shortcuts also in Windows terminology) in another folder but they appear completely transparent during normal access, meaning the file and folder that was linked to another folder appears as a normal file or folder and you can perform operations on the symbolic link as if the referenced file/folder was actually present itself instead of the symbolic link.

UPDATE (June 11, 2011): A complete sample ASP.NET application demonstrating features in this blog post is available here: ASP.NET - A complete translation framework through Powershell and Google Translate