Created a short video about how to do a Mail Merge from Microsoft Outlook using the Categories option for Contacts.

See all the details here

Found a decent article about custom parameters for data sources in ASP.NET.  It was written by Eilon Lipton who has been on the ASP.NET team for quite a while at Microsoft.  The article discuss how to insert your own custom parameters and has easy examples and a good explanation.

We use Google Analytics (GA) for all our sites and most of our client sites.   It often provides the most bang for the buck and makes slicing and dicing your analytics pretty easy to do.

On of the most interesting sections of Google Analytics is in the Visitors section and it is called User Defined.  This is an area that allows you to create some customized “tags” or “labels” for any of your visitors.

I could go on and explain all the nitty-gritty details, but guys over at Google Analytics have already posted a very detailed explanation on how to implement this capability and shows how it can provide additional value to the tremendous value that GA already provides.

To review all the User Defined details you just use the links already created in this post.

LogMeIn is a platform that we use internally for our own computers as well as all our clients.

One of the most useful features of the LogMeIn offering is the ability to setup a secondary user to allow access to one or more computers in your account.  It is pretty easy to setup this feature.

By creating Secondary Users in your LogMeIn account, you can allow remote access to one or more of your computers.   Secondary Users have access only to the computers that you authorize, and you can disable their access at any time.  Secondary Users can not see any details of your LogMeIn account.

To create a Secondary User, follow these steps:

1. Log in to LogMeIn.com using your registered email and password.
2. On the My Computers page, click the Users link on the left side of the screen.  If you do not see the Users link you probably have to change your view to be “Advanced View”.
3. Click the Secondary Users link at the top of the screen
4. Click Add New Secondary User.
5. Enter the email address for the Secondary User that you are adding to you account.
6. If you don’t specifically change the permissions, the secondary user will have access to all computers in your account.  However, you can select specific computers using the Specify Computers option
7. Once done, click Send Invitation.

Note: Secondary Users are required to define their own password when accepting the invitation, and can change it at any time.   The Secondary User will need to know the Windows Username and Password for the computer’s they have received access to.  If the computers are on a domain they can probably login with their own domain logins.

Found some discounts on Lenovo laptops (and some desktops) and thought I would pass it along.

Promo Code: USPENTERAIN3

Save an additional 10% + Free Shipping

There are some pretty decent laptops available.

Ran across an issue today when trying to get my DropDownList embedded within a GridView.   Here is an extract of the code (the error is in the red text):

<ItemTemplate>
  <asp:DropDownList
        ID="ddlMaker"
        runat="server"
        DataSourceID="odsMakers"
        DataTextField="makerName"
        SelectedValue="<%#Bind("MakerID") %>"
        DataValueField="makerID">
  </asp:DropDownList>
</ItemTemplate>

When I compiled I received an error “The server tag is not well formed.”

After a bit of trial and error I realized it was because there were quotes nested within quotes. To make this work all that had to be done was to change the outside double quotes on the SelectedValue parameter to be single quotes as shown below.

<ItemTemplate>
  <asp:DropDownList
        ID="ddlMaker"
        runat="server"
        DataSourceID="odsMakers"
        DataTextField="makerName"
        SelectedValue='<%#Bind("MakerID") %>'
        DataValueField="makerID">
  </asp:DropDownList>
</ItemTemplate>

Hope I saved someone a bunch of wasted time.

Ran across an interesting approach to generating insert statements for SQL Server 2005 (and other variants).  If uses a less well known function called master.dbo.fn_varbintohexstr. The approach that was taken was to use the fn_varbintohexstr function to encode the data so you did not need to use cursors or any fancy parsing to handle unicode and quotes in the generated insert statements.  I thought it was a bit clever.

Note: you might need to register at SQLServerCentral.com to gain access to the site to read the above linked article.

One of the great features of Outlook (but also sometimes annoying) is that it remembers all the email addresses of the people that you send email to or receive email from.  This makes it really easy for composing emails except for when you get an email address that is spelled incorrectly in that list.  That can be extremely frustrating.

Turns out that it is super simple to remove that email address.  Just compose and email and start typing the address.  When you see it appear, just use the arrows to select the one that is incorrect and press the Delete key.  It will be gone forever.  Quick and easy.

If you want to clear the entire email history, you can do the following:

• Exit Outlook
• Run Windows Explorer
• Navigate to the C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook folder (substitute username with your username)
• Find the file with the NK2 extension and rename or delete it.

A few weeks ago a client of ours asked if there was a way to get a Remote Desktop session to go full screen across the two monitors that they had connected to their computer.  There didn’t seem to be an obvious method to do this.  Upon some further research we discovered that there was a command line option for the Remote Desktop application called /span which allows a single session to span multiple monitors.

If you have two (or more) monitors that are the same height, you could issue the following command:

mstsc /span

When the Remote Desktop application starts up it will ask you what Computer you want to connect to.  Just enter the name or IP address of the computer and you will be connected in full screen mode across your two (or more) monitors.

Some notes from the Microsoft Help about what the /span option does and its limitations:

Matches the remote desktop width and height with the local virtual desktop, spanning across multiple monitors if necessary. To span across monitors, the monitors must all have the same height and be aligned side by side.

In order to save the /span option into the .rdp file you will need to manually edit it:

• Open Windows Explorer, and browse to the folder containing the .rdp file you want to edit.
• Right-click the file > Open With > Choose Program > Notepad (or any other text editing program you have installed on your computer)
• Once the file is open in Notepad go to the bottom of the file and add the following command: span monitors:i:1
• Save the file.

Now your rdp file will automatically span monitors when executed.

Most of you probably have already experimented with the Control Toolkit, but just in case you never ran across it, take a look at these Toolkit samples

If you have any questions about them, drop me a comment here.