memory.Refresh()

I’ve recently been trying to get automatic Windows updates working on Vista. Every time it tried to fetch the updates, it reported an error code of 80070057. After getting more detailed information from the WindowsUpdate.log in the Windows directory, the problem turned out to be the proxy server in our office. Whilst my user profile has the correct proxy server settings, the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) that is used to download Windows updates doesn’t. The solution is to set the proxy server for the system.

To see the current proxy settings, run from the command line:

netsh winhttp show proxy

If it says “direct”, there are no proxy settings and Windows update probably will not work.

To set the proxy settings, run from the command line (you will probably need to run this with administrative permissions):

netsh winhttp set proxy proxy-server="yourproxy:port" bypass-list="<local>"

This will set the proxy server on the system to allow the BITS service to connect to the Windows updates servers.

If you have ever run some SQL within SQL Server Management Studio only to realise that you’ve run it against the master database by mistake, you’ll know that it can sometimes be hard to undo the damage.

A simple way to stop these accidental changes is to create a database trigger that will prevent any schema changes to the master database:

USE master
GO

CREATE TRIGGER StopSchemaChanges ON DATABASE FOR 
CREATE_APPLICATION_ROLE, ALTER_APPLICATION_ROLE, DROP_APPLICATION_ROLE,
CREATE_ASSEMBLY, ALTER_ASSEMBLY, DROP_ASSEMBLY,
CREATE_CERTIFICATE, ALTER_CERTIFICATE, DROP_CERTIFICATE,
GRANT_DATABASE, DENY_DATABASE, REVOKE_DATABASE,
CREATE_EVENT_NOTIFICATION, DROP_EVENT_NOTIFICATION,
CREATE_FUNCTION, ALTER_FUNCTION, DROP_FUNCTION,
CREATE_INDEX, ALTER_INDEX, DROP_INDEX,
CREATE_PROCEDURE, ALTER_PROCEDURE, DROP_PROCEDURE,
CREATE_SCHEMA, ALTER_SCHEMA, DROP_SCHEMA,
CREATE_STATISTICS, DROP_STATISTICS, UPDATE_STATISTICS,
CREATE_SYNONYM, DROP_SYNONYM,
CREATE_TABLE, ALTER_TABLE, DROP_TABLE,
CREATE_TRIGGER, ALTER_TRIGGER, DROP_TRIGGER,
CREATE_VIEW, ALTER_VIEW, DROP_VIEW
AS 
BEGIN
    RAISERROR(N'Do you really modify the master database?', 16, 1) WITH NOWAIT
    ROLLBACK TRANSACTION
END
GO

Any time you attempt to change the master database, SQL Server will fail with an error. If you do want to make a schema change, simply disable the trigger and then re-enable it once the schema change is complete.

(NB. this only works with SQL Server 2005 and above)

I was editing a large SQL script inside Visual Studio today and needed to insert several spaces into multiple lines to make the script more readable.

Turning something like this:

some text on line a
some text on line b
some text on line c
some text on line d

into:

some text      on line a
some text      on line b
some text      on line c
some text      on line d

I thought of doing it manually by hand, but as there were lots of lines to alter, I thought there must be a better way. I then remembered a feature of a word processor called ProText that I had many years ago on the Atari ST that had a feature called “Box Selection”. This enabled you to select text across multiple lines without having to select the whole line (a bit like drawing a box with the mouse).

A quick search later and I found the instructions on how to do box selections in Visual Studio in an article on Sara Ford’s blog.

Just hold down the Alt key whilst selecting text with the mouse and Visual Studio will switch from its normal “stream selection” mode into “box selection” mode. Once selected, you can indent the text using the tab key as normal and it will insert space to get the desired effect.

I have recently re-installed Firefox, and was getting more and more annoyed by what seemed to be a blinking cursor appearing in web pages. After a bit of searching, I found out what it was thanks to Rishi who has had the same problem.

It is a feature called “Caret Browsing” which places a cursor in web pages so that text can be selected using only the keyboard. To turn the feature off, just press the F7 key or change the accessibility.browsewithcaret option from the about:config page.

When working with several source control branches, especially with a large solution with many projects, it is not always practical to open Visual Studio to perform a quick build. Using NAnt is one alternative solution, but this requires creating and maintaining a build script. Using MSBuild from the command line is another option, but this involves getting the command line arguments correct, and working with command line output is not easy to visually filter. The same goes for using Visual Studio from the command line.

Gaston Milano has created a simple tool called Build Console capable of loading both MSBuild and Visual Studio solution files, and building any of the available build targets.

It’s main features are:

• The ability to choose which target/project to build.
• A build report in a tree structure to show the status of each project built.
• The ability to choose the verbosity of the build output.
• A coloured build output log to distinguish different types out log output.
• A ‘quick history’ to load recently built solutions.

Whilst a little rough around the edges, it comes in very handy for those times where you just need to compile quickly without the overhead of loading Visual Studio.