Marius's Personal site

In can you don't already know it, Windows 7 supports booting from VHD, which I'm a big fan of. This way you don't need to worry with partitioning scheme, shuffling around when you want to install additional Windows versions, backup / restore...

After almost 6 years of running my site with Webhost4life where I didn't have a lot of complaints I was kind of forced to move away because they could no longer accomodate my hosting. It all started in May of 2010 when suddenly I received an email that...

A few days ago Red Gate has announced that it acquired Reflector from Lutz Roeder, which is big news given the fact it is kind of core tool for .NET. In case you don't know yet Reflector was listed in top 10 of the tools that every .NET developer...

A few months ago I was looking for a Sitemap provider for CommunityServer, given that more and more search engines are using this technology to obtain additional information from indexed sites. I found Dan Bartel's Sitemap provider which is explained...

Sharepoint leverages a lot of things, and developers can focus on their added value instead of figuring out basic stuff like authentication, document storage, search and so on. This makes Sharepoint a great platform to develop on, but it has some hidden...

Since my last update some changes have appeared in the steps needed to create a patch using Wix. The good news is that you no longer need MSIMSP to create a patch (and all the hurdles required to obtain MSIMSP). Pyro is the new tool that can be used...

In the past couple of weeks I've been busy trying to update a Windows 2000 installation to Windows 2003. Apparently something went very wrong, so the upgrade took about a week in total or so, because setup program failed to do some steps apparently required...

If you are trying to create MSP files ( aka MSI patches ), one of the best tool I found to create PCP files is Wix. The amount of documentation for MSP creation is extremely small in my opinion, most of the required hints are in the Wix documentation....

This post is inspired from another post (in Romanian, sorry for the not Romanian speakers), which asks about the usefulness of System.Reflection.Assembly class. This class is primarly your one stop shop if you want to implement a plugin host in...

Yesterday I found that Cory at AddressOf has a spare subscription to Visual Studio 2005 Team System Suite with MSDN and it's giving for free to the one that impress him the most. Now the problem is how I catch his attention to get this subscription. ...

Have you seen the design of Vista and Office boxes? Apparently I'm not the only one that after seeing the Vista and Office 2007 boxes thought that they look like the Office for Mac retail boxes. In case you want to know more about Vista, you can use...

If you are having a split configuration where you are hosting the external Community Server site on a different server than the web site that is visible internally but you are sharing the exact same database, or the URL for your blog differs depending...

Quite some time ago I have written a small utility that allows users to upload multiple Reporting Services reports (RDL files) at once to a Reporting Services Server. I have decided to make this utility public as others might find it useful. The main...

I told you before that I updated my WRT54GL router to DD-WRT. One of the neat things of this new firmware is IPv6 support. In case you do not know IPv6 is the next generation of IP protocol, which addresses a major problem nowadays, the fact that IPv4...

As I was saying quite some time ago I decided to upgrading my router firmware. Originally, I wanted to buy this particular model, due it's upgradeability to a open source firmware. The upgrade was a little bit postponed due the fact my computer decided...

After a long time I managed to get my computer working again.Two months ago my mainboard decided to no longer boot Windows, mainly due to expanding capacitors. Originally I didn't know that and I assumed that the hard disk is malfunctioning (being the...

In case you don't know Linksys WRT54GL is the actual version of one of the most routers that kept the headlines a couple of years ago, since Linksys used some GPL code in their firmware and eventually they were forced to release firmware sources and as...

If you ever wondered why there isn't a lot of activity on this blog lately, even if I said that I will try to be more active, now I'm ready to share the news. Well, the unexpected hapenned and in the past 4 months I've gone through a relocation process...

I've just finished upgrading my site to Community Server 2.0. Well, my opinions are mixed at this point at least from an "administrator" point of view. Although the interface is more complex and with a lot of new features I was kind of puzzled that out...

Being the proud owner of an Orange SPV C500 phone, I decided that it is the time to buy a GPS. After a little bit of digging the Internet, and by the way I haven't seen so far a lot of comparative testing on GPS chipsets, or even implementations, I found...

Well, Nov 7th passed, Visual Studio 2005 (aka Whidbey) was launched, as well as Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Unfortunately, my lack of time is quite severe and I even haven't got time to download the final version. As far as can tell, the change are...

In case if you leave on another planet, let's reiterate the old news: Whidbey launch date is November 7th.So far I have used Beta2, in a VMWare virtual machine which has 512 MB RAM dedicated, on an Athlon 1800+ CPU, and I am pretty impressed by it's speed....

As you could see I've completed too the migration from nGallery to CommunityServer, without major incidents and data loss.I've used a migration utility which is sort of official, of course I found a bug, when migration comments they assumed that Anonymous...

Note: this is a prerecorded post. It has been started on the La Guardia airport while I was headed to Charlotte, NC (Sep 28). Today I've actually flied around 5200 miles from Romania to Charlotte, via New York. I have to go to Charlotte to...

Since I bought a new camera (more on this later), I decided that nGallery is good but not enough to display pictures. It has some problems with displaying EXIF data, so I said that upgrade worths the time. I downloaded Community Server 1.1 and installed...