dans.blog


The miscellaneous ramblings and thoughts of Dan G. Switzer, II

Logging in to Vista using an administrative share

I've recently migrated two of my PCs to Vista. I was trying to wait until Windows 7, but I had to physically replace the boxes so my hand was forced into (yeah, I could have downgraded, but I figured I should actually work with Vista a bit before moving to Windows 7 if for no other reason that to appreciate it more.)

Anyway, one of the problems I've had was logging into the boxes using the administrative shares. Well this is disabled by default (and for good reason,) I needed a way to access via the shares and came across this article from Microsoft:

Error message when you try to access an administrative share on a Windows Vista-based computer from another Windows Vista-based computer that is a member of a workgroup: "Logon unsuccessful: Windows is unable to log you on"

This has allowed me to access my box from Windows XP and my other Vista boxes when I log in w/admin credentials—which is exactly what I wanted to do. While this isn't a recommended thing to enable, it seems you can toggle it off/on without rebooting—which is nice.


Pagination in MSSQL 2005 with one-to-many joins

I was working on restructuring some old code that needed some pagination. The query in question used a one-to-many join the required information together. Imagine a search engine where you're wanting to search over orders, but want to group the results by customer. The output might look something like:

Gary Dell'Abate
  Order #: 12098
  Order #: 13232
  Order #: 14551
  Order #: 16770
Fred Norris
  Order #: 11021
  Order #: 11029
Robin Quivers
  Order #: 10010
  Order #: 11001
  Order #: 12001
Howard Stern
  Order #: 13001

So, in my situation I want to also paginate by the customers. When SQL Server 2005 was introduced, it added a new feature called Common Table Expressions (CTEs.) One of the most useful features of CTEs is to paginate recordsets. Typically when paginating results, you will use the row_number() function—which creates a new unique row number for each row in your recordset:

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Better handling of winmail.dat messages in Thunderbird with LookOut

Over the last few days I've been setting up a new laptop and got Thunderbird up and running (which I'm now going to try to use exclusively.) I've been using Thunderbird on my laptop for work related e-mails for 4 or 5 years now. One of the issues I've always had with it was handling TNEF encoded messages (aka "winmail.dat") that Outlook insists on sending.

Now this is really a problem with Outlook in that it doesn't always honor the "HTML" format and sometime insists on sending e-mail in Outlook's native format. If you use Outlook, you have no problems. However, every other client will just get the dreaded "winmail.dat" file as an attachment.

In the past I've just used program (like Winmail Reader) to open the winmail.dat file and view the RTF and attachments. However, I decided to search the Thunderbird Add-ons page to see if anyone had developed a better solution and thankfully Aron Rubin has developed the wonderful LookOut add-on.

LookOut automatically converts the winmail.dat into it's associated attachments and creates a RTF file that you can double-click on to open in Word (or your associated RTF application.) This solution works really well, because I know longer have to open the winmail.dat in an external program just to see the attachments.

So kudos to Aron Rubin for this excellent add-on!