September 2010 archive

Ping, Windows 7, and the Windows Firewall

If you cannot ping a Windows 7 box, don’t just disable the Windows Firewall.  See the following page describing how to enable the included ICMP Echo rule in the Windows Firewall: http://www.fixya.com/support/r5359816-allow_ping_icmp_echo_request_windows_7 Note that I shut down the Windows Firewall service (net stop mpssvc) and this did not “re-enable” ping.  I had to add the …

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Consolidating Multiple VMware VMDK Disk Files into One

If you have older VMware Workstation disk images (vmdk files) that are split into multiple parts, you can consolidate them into a single disk image from the command prompt: vmware-vdiskmanager -r MyVirtualMachineDisk.vmdk -t 0 SingleDiskFile.vmdk The “-t 0” means “single growable virtual disk”.  If you prefer to preallocate all the storage for the disk, use …

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Enable SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to Overwrite Table Designs

By default, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) will not let you save changes to the designs of your tables.  When you attempt to do so, it wants you to drop and re-create the table.  You will typically see a dialog similar to the following: However, SSMS will actually let you perform such a change without …

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VS2010 Automatically Includes Your Text Files as Resources

When you right-click on your WPF project in Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010) and select Add / New Item… / Text File, the “Build Action” on this file is automatically set to “Resource.”  So, when you ship your application, this text file will be embedded within it.  If this was simply meant to be a readme …

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Change the Default VS2010 Start Page “Language”

When you first run Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010), it asks you to select a profile (e.g. C#, C++).  This determines the Start Page displayed when VS2010 starts.  Once you pick this, there appears to be no easy way to change your selection (at least none that I’ve found).  To see which start pages are available …

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