Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

  Windows system key combinations F1: Help CTRL+ESC: Open Start menu ALT+TAB: Switch between open programs ALT+F4: Quit program SHIFT+DELETE: Delete item permanently Windows Logo+L: Lock the computer (without using CTRL+ALT+DELETE)   Windows program key combinations CTRL+C: Copy CTRL+X: Cut CTRL+V: Paste CTRL+Z: Undo CTRL+B: Bold CTRL+U: Underline CTRL+I: Italic   Mouse click/keyboard modifier combinations for shell objects SHIFT+right click: Displays a shortcut menu containing alternative commands SHIFT+double click: Runs the alternate default command (the second item on the menu) ALT+double click: Displays properties SHIFT+DELETE: Deletes an item immediately without placing it in the Recycle Bin   General keyboard-only commands F1: Starts Windows Help F10: Activates menu bar options SHIFT+F10 Opens a shortcut menu for the selected item (this is the same as right-cl...

In my “Too Big to Fail?” post, I talked a little about the unprecedented  monetary expansion we have entered. Perhaps it’s time to expand on this topic. In 2007, the federal deficit was 1.2 percent of G.D.P. Two years later, more than a year into a serious  economic crisis it is 13% of GDP -- more than twice the size of the next largest deficit since World War II -– the  projected deficit is the result of a year when the federal government, at taxpayers' expense, has acquired enormous stakes in the banking, auto, mortgage, health-care and insurance industries. The average historical deficit is about 2.5% of GDP. With the ill-conceived government reactions to the financial crises, and the economic downturn that has followed, the unfunded liabilities of various federal programs -- such as Social Security, pensions, Medicare and Medicaid -- are over the $100 trillion mark. With U.S. federal tax receipts at about $2.4 trillion, this level of debt virtually  guarantees...

The argument is familiar. Just like AIG and General Motors, California says it is too big to fail. And once again, I say: LET IT FAIL . Let’s stop the bullshit, printing fake money so we can try to pump life into zombie banks, insurers, automakers, and states – all at taxpayer expense. Let’s talk about inflation for a moment. Let’s talk about letting the markets correct themselves, painful as that may seem to be. I’ve watched a few of those Zombie movies. And I know that you cannot stop the Zombies by appeasing them with money. The only way to stop them is to chop off their heads . The fiscal equivalent is to let the big insurers, banks, automakers – and even states, take bankruptcy and reorganize. It’s not the end of the world, and it isn’t the taxpayer’s mandate to shore up institutions who don’t understand basic fiscal responsibility.  Don’t we remember “The Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf’”? Inflation is seldom defined. Inflation is simply  a decline in the value of mone...

Recently Microsoft made Visual Studio 2010 available to MSDN Universal subscribers, and will shortly make it available to the general public as well. Previously this had only been available as a closed MVP limited CTP downloadable on Connect. Visual Studio 2010 provides some really attractive advances, particularly in the area of dynamic languages (F# now being a full-fledged Visual Studio language choice), Workflow (with a brand new workflow engine), Cloud computing (Azure), and – for Silverlight developers – not only is there now a full interactive drag-and-drop designer window, but you can choose whether you want to develop with Silverlight 2 – or Silverlight 3 – all from the same IDE! I’ve installed this on my primary development desktop machine alongside Visual Studio 2008, and while it hasn’t been long enough (only 2 days) to make firm determinations, so far I have not seen any “interferences” from having both products installed at all. If you are interested in a detailed ...

I was trying to print out the Silverlight riaservicesoverviewpreview.pdf and, like so many other PDF files, it came out with missing letters that were blank and basically, thanks to Adobe’s bullshit marketing, I invested 116 pages worth of dead trees and printer ink to get a totally useless document . If you’re like me (and I suspect there are a lot of us) you will often print out this kind of  stuff so you can sit in bed before you go to sleep and take out your hellacious yellow highlighter and mark up a document that you are studying. Well! So much for that. Not only that, but Adobe’s latest version of Reader is bloated software that takes up a lot of resources, and they’re now using it to “Package” Adobe Air and whatever other gobbledegook they think I should have, that bears NO FYOOKIN’ RELATION to viewing and printing documents. I don’t have a choice anymore. If I refuse to accept the Air Installation, I CANNOT HAVE THE FREE ADOBE READER, unless i want to go find an older ...

The main focus of Silverlight RIA Services is to provide an easy-to-use infrastructure for service-enabling Silverlight Applications, sharing of common entity classes, and performing bi-directional work with data in your Silverlight applications. Controls can be made “data aware”, and you can save a lot of time by not having to write a lot of code to be able to work with data from the server. RIA services also provides an easy way to hook in ASP.NET Membership, Role, and Profile providers to your Silverlight application, and to enable the UserContext on Silverlight controls. Once you grasp everything that Silverlight RIA Services offers, you will see that developing data-aware LOB applications with Silverlight has just been made an order of magnitude easier. You will be able to spend your time focusing on what you want your application to do instead of spending a lot of tedious time to put in the plumbing just to get to “first base”. Silverlight RIA Services already gives you all the...

Recently we had a forum moderator (which people we pay a nice monthly stipend) get into some issues with drug abuse problems. This individual had to be checked into a rehab clinic to get himself straightened out.  While I was aware of him having these issues in the past, I was not aware that this person was still having such problems. But the bigger problem is that the correct security policy was not 100% in place, and that is 100% my responsibility. Long story short, due to a lack of security enforcement on our part, my site account and all my articles and such ended up getting deleted. I had to restore them from a most recent database backup. Not a very big deal, but certainly an annoyance.  Needless to say, we now have a new Forum Moderator. The definition of Principle of Least Privilege is fairly simple and easy to comprehend. The idea is that users will be given only the privileges absolutely necessary to perform any given task. This might be configuring their compute...

The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it.    - Laurence J. Peter Well this one is a hoot. Enabled HTTP compression in IIS 6.0, and suddenly Classic ASP pages (yes, we still have a few) that required Integrated Authentication just wouldn’t work. With Anonymous Authentication unchecked, and Integrated checked, and ACL’s on the folder permitting only Adminstrators, you would get a Windows Login prompt as expected but when you would provide credentials, it never went through. As luck would have it, we duplicated the pages on another site where compression was turned off, and those worked fine. On a hunch, I disabled compression on the includes folder, and that fixed it! Seems for some reason that Classic ASP include files don’t like HTTP compression at all. And a thanks to Rick Strahl for reminding me that you need HTTP KeepAlives turned on to use Windows Auth with classic ASP. Compression will reduce our bandwidth to around 25% of what it has be...

I’ve noticed this new “Groups” thing in the latest version of Windows Live Messenger, and it seems that the kind folks at Microsoft have really  started to “get it” about what “Social” is. If you enable the “What’s new” display at the bottom of the Live Messenger window, you will see people in your “group” (that you have started) who have joined other people’s networks. If you click on the links, you can view information about that user and their network, and you can invite them to join (or, ask to join).  It’s not that intuitive at first, but if you play around with it using people that you know, you’ll start seeing new Contacts in your contacts list – most likely people you didn’t know were using Messenger, and / or you probably never thought to invite. I’ve already made a few new friends with this – people I always wanted to be able to have on Messenger, but I either never thought of it, or I didn’t know how to invite them. When “Groups” first was started, I started a...

“Being an expert means having credibility. It doesn’t matter how much you know if people don’t trust your answers.” – Brent Ozar Silverlight 3 was first announced at the IBC 2008 show in Amsterdam on September 12, 2008. It was unveiled at MIX09 in Las Vegas on March 18, 2009. A beta version was made available for download the same day. Silverlight 3 includes an increased number of controls - including but not limited to DataGrid , TreeView , various layout panels, DataForm for forms-driven applications and DataPager for viewing paginated data . Some of these controls are from the Silverlight Toolkit . In addition, Silverlight 3 includes a navigation framework to let Silverlight applications use the hyperlinked navigation model as well as enabling deep-linking (linking directly to specific pages) within Silverlight applications. On the media front, Silverlight 3 supports AAC audio decoding as well as hardware-accelerated H.264 video decoding . The native multimedia pipeline i...