Hardware Geeks

So recently I've been playing with jQuery and integrating it in to Sharepoint for basic AJAX functionality in places. Jan Tielens has some great posts to help get started in the area, a personal favorite of mine so far is his post for doing inline search located here: Search as you type with jQuery.

However, I've gone ahead and extended his great baseline code a bit for if you want to view full search results instead of just the top few results. Read on for the code changes.

I’ve been scouring the internet for more information on what’s new with the upcoming SharePoint 2010 release.

Information about administration and user experience: Business Collaboration Platform
Information about the new development experience, and some more admin information: Developer and IT Pro Outtakes
Document sets (folders done right): Document Sets in SP2010

I’m looking forward to a lot of the changes, especially the visual webpart designer, AJAX enabled views, and proper folders (document sets). The performance metrics are pretty nifty too.

CodePlex was Microsoft’s answer to SourceForge. Today though Microsoft has announced that CodePlex is now it’s own private entity in the open source world and gave it seed money to help get it started. This is great news in my opinion. CodePlex is an invaluable asset to developers and users alike with code, working programs and community help all available. If you haven’t checked it out, go do so now: CodePlex.

The new CodePlex foundation has an interim Board of Directors comprised of three Microsoft employees and three non-Microsoftees.

Read More!

This might just be a pet peeve, but why can't I use runas properly in Windows 7? Runas under 7 requires an elevated process before it can run (even though it's for running a program under a different authenticated context). The only two workarounds for it are annoying, first one, have a command prompt open that's elevated and use the runas command from there. This is annoying but doable. However what I chose was to write a bat script for each of the programs I use that need different credentials and run those as administrators.

Their is one caveat though to both methods, you have to authenticate against UAC before you can elevate the process. For me I authenticate using the same account I'm trying to do runas with why can't I just have UAC elevate the application context using the account I just put in instead of running in the pseudo-admin current user context? Mostly I'm just annoyed I have to sign in twice for every single thing I want to run under my administrative account.

Yesterday I wrote some code for automated detection and notification of Ilomo/Clampi infections on a client machine, if theirs interest I can post the code/binary for it. In the mean time however here’s a rundown of how to find the virus and how it propagates itself.

*UPDATE*
Attached sourcecode with a readme on how to use it in your environment.
ilomoRegScanner.zip

So I got asked a question earlier on how to do custom formatting in an infopath form for doing Social Security Numbers and Phone Numbers. Surprised I hadn’t been asked before, here’s a copy of the formula used for getting it working.

*UPDATED*
Updated code with how to get it to work on the currently selected field rather than on a secondary field

I was scanning around last night for SharePoint 2010 news and came across some Microsoft images showing the updated default UI and it’s use of Silverlight, cross-browser support and extended API.

So, I’ve been screwing around with the data view webpart a bit more and figured this bit of code I came up with would come in handy for others. What it does is compare two fields and if they match doesn’t show one of the fields. If they do match it shows the full date span of the two fields.

This post is nothing but a rant about how incredibly backwards update priority using Windows Updates is. I just did a fresh install of Vista x64 on my development machine yesterday, and I had it go ahead and download updates off of our local WSUS server. Now I’d personally expect Windows Update to go and install the Service Pack first, since all updates up to the point of SP1’s release are included in SP1. No, I’d be wrong. Instead it grabbed roughly 3.5GB of updates and addons (86 in total), none of which were the service pack. So I went and spent the next 3 hours letting those install. Reboot and run Windows Update again. 34 new updates show up, again, no service pack. I would just go onto the WSUS update share and grab the service pack there, rather than download the 700MB+ x64 edition service pack off of Microsoft’s website, but WSUS uses near random GUID’s for the filenames of every update rather than the KB# with version. So I’ve now spent about 4.5 hours waiting for windows to install updates and I haven’t even gotten to the service pack I wanted to start with!

Is it really so hard to give priority to roll-up packages and service packs?