Archive for July, 2009

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.