Well my first real post on BlogEngine.Net is…about BlogEngine.Net! After running the import program from my old DotNetNuke blog I found that the importer had worked, but that the blog entries had not shown up. This was because the cache that BE.Net uses for the XML data files. Since I’m on a shared hosting I couldn’t just run an IISReset.exe, so I obviously needed a work around, and here it is:

I miss WordPress. I miss the fact that it would save my work periodically, and that if my session timed out while the I was writing a blog, it would be there when I logged back in as an unpublished daft. I miss having my categorised posts. I miss having tags to tell me what I’ve written about. Even Google seems to prefer my old blog, old pages that don’t exist are returned where these ones sit in anonymity.

We were integrating a 3rd party product’s web parts with MOSS the other day and came accross an interesting problem. In site editing mode, all the drop down menus would appear for a flash and then go blank. The actual admin pages we were trying to get to would work if you entered them into the browser directly, but that isn’t an easy way to manage the site! The problem turned out to be that in the process of getting the 3rd party web parts to work, the support team had added a MIME type to the IIS installation.

Had an interesting one yesterday, my bosses Vista laptop booted as per normal, making all the right pictures until just before the log in prompt popped up, then a black screen in what looked to be VGA graphics with the white default arrow cursor. Corrupted graphics drivers, I thought. A quick boot into safe mode…but no, the same black screen and over-sized pointer. No problem, Last Known Good Configuration will save my day…except that LKGC points are set when the OS manages a successful boot, and Vista had, in it’s own opinion, successfully booted.

I was adding a shiny new domain controller to my server farm earlier today, we have just two Windows 2000 SP4 domain controllers on old kit and they are due to retire. With the hardware selected, purchased and a fresh copy of Windows Server 2003 R2 installed, I set to installing Active Directory. DCPromo.exe fires up and I go through the configuration steps until… "The Active Directory Installation Wizard cannot continue because the forest is not prepared for installing Windows Server 2003.

If you’ve logged onto the properties for your IIS install and found that the ASP.NET tab has mysteriously disappered, you can try a couple of things. Firstly, try re-registering ASP.NET with IIS using the ASPNET_REGIIS.exe located in the .NET installation folder: c:\WINDOWS\MICROSOFT.NET\framework\\aspnet_regiis -i   Chances are though, that it won't work, and that you can try and number of command using aspnet_regiis.exe or even uninstalling and reinstalling .NET and you won't actually fix the problem.

When the Dell engineer said “they’ve asked if you can reinstall the OS” my heart sank. Not because I felt like he was weasling out of work - unusually they were very helpful. Not because installing XP is a hard task, I’ve done it over 100 times on all sorts of hardware. No, the reason I let out a sigh was because this particular laptop, the Latitude X1, has no internal CD/DVD drive.

Recently I found the need to retrieve the key from an existing Exchange Server for a reinstall - the software is legally licensed but the key was somehow lost. A trawl through my registry revealed that the key is stored in an obscure place: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Integration\{GUID}\PID3.0 This was the case on a Windows Server 2000 install with Exchange Server 2003 installed, when I get the chance I will test this on Server 2003.

I’ve just removed a domain controller (DC) from my root domain, the very first server not only in the domain, but the forest. The roles were migrating to a newer server, far more up to the job, but it isn’t a job to be taken lightly. If you mess up the root domain, you’ve potentially got problems all the way down your domain hierarchy.   Let me explain; the primary domain controller in a domain (normally the first domain controller) hosts all the FSMO roles.

Incredibly irritating error when you go to install under your user account when you’re using mapped drives for your documents. All our domain users have a userfolder on the server, it’s mapped as z:\ and there is a folder redirection set up. It’s pretty standard in a corporate/domain environment, so why does it cause so many Vista installations to fail?   This is something I’ve run into time and time again and There are a couple of things you can try…sometimes they work individually, sometimes not!