SwisherTech

I have been needing this for along time. I can not count how many times I have sat around waiting for a Windows XP machine to start Microsoft automatic updates. In Windows Vista the Widows update window has a button to force the OS to go out to the internet (unless your using a Windows Server Update Service (WSUS)) and get updates. In Windows XP use this command line tool:

wuauclt.exe /detectnow

I was running into a problem with a SQL query string being terminated to soon. One of the variables I was using in the concatenation of the string contained an apostrophe. In order to handle this situation you have to put two apostrophes to escape the character in the string.

For example SELECT column1 FROM table WHERE column2='values's' needs to be SELECT column1 FROM table WHERE column2='values''s'.

The application I was writing used Jython. Jython is just Python implemented in Java. I have found working with strings in Jython to be very easy.

Here is the function I came up with to use on the variable before using it in the SQL query string.

def sqlApostrophes(strInput):
	strOutput = strInput.replace("'","''")

	return strOutput

I have recently setup an IMAP email account in Outlook. After using it for a few days I notice that none of the mail items I delete disappear. Each time I delete a mail item it just becomes grey with a line crossing it off. I thought at first it just took time for the message to leave the server. After a couple of days of a cluttered inbox I did a search on the internet and found that you have to tell the Outlook email client to purge all the deleted mail from the server. Here are the steps:

When you want to delete all the crossed out emails go to Edit->Purge->Purge Marked Items in “your email account”

Two things happened to me today when I tried setting up Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 on my Windows 7 x64 development machine. First I received an error saying "Virtual PC could not open the virtual machine network services driver." To solve this problem I had to go into the network adapter properties of the host machine and enable "Virtual Machine Network Services." Here is a picture of the network adapter property you want to have checked.

I found the solution to this problem at http://www.aspdeveloper.net

After the network service error was gone I then received an error when starting the virtual machine. The error said "The network adapter with address "00:00:00:00:00:00" of virtual machine 'VMName' failed to initialize because the address is a null address." To fix this problem I had to edit the registry by using regedit. Here are the steps:
1. Examine the key value at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002bE10318}\nnnn\DriverDesc to locate the desired host adapter where nnnn is a four digit number.
2. Look at the GUID value for the NetCfgInstanceId key value.
3. Add the DWORD key named "Flags" at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VPCNetS2\Parameters\Adapters\"guid" and set the value to 0 where "guid" is the GUID found in step 2.
4. Restart the computer.

I found the solution to this problem at http://blogs.msdn.com

I was trying to create an image of Windows 7 for Windows Deployment Services (WDS) when I ran into a problem with sysprep. Every time I ran sysprep I would receive this error. "A fatal error occurred while trying to sysprep the machine." I tried both a command window and the GUI interface of sysprep. I then came across this webpage http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproinstall/thread/8f5002e1-95b4-47bf-b031-4b72b3eb388a/. The problem seemed to be with one of the Microsoft Media Player processes. The process I killed was wmpnscfg.exe. You may need to show processes for all users. Once wmpnscfg.exe was ended sysprep ran just fine.