Coding Dojo

Mark mentions on his blog that he attended a Coding Dojo the other day.  I won’t go in to details here as Mark covers it all in his post, but it’s an interesting idea.

It made me think, maybe we should do some exercises like this at work?

Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1

As mentioned in an earlier post, I recently upgraded from Vista to Windows 7.  Be warned, if like me, you have Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 installed the Windows 7 upgrade breaks .NET 4 quite drastically!  If only I’d seen Scott Hanselman's post first!

Luckily the following steps seemed to have done the job on my PC:

1. Uninstall VS2010 Beta

2. Uninstall .NET 4 by doing the following:

For x86 OS:
cmd /c "msiexec /x {19BD09BF-3BBD-3663-A5ED-50B6B2B07E42} /qb"
cmd /c "msiexec /x {1DF6A8F6-5048-323F-8758-DA533CE0F07E} /qb"
For amd64 OS:
cmd /c "msiexec /x {175D5555-EE49-3033-99AF-BC1E206223FD} /qb"
cmd /c "msiexec /x {13B27C82-19BA-3494-9420-F932B40673CA} /qb"

3. Reboot, just in case!

I found this in a forum post linked from Scott’s page.

Pinning a network folder to the start menu in Windows 7

In Vista, I had the root of one of the network drives I use pinned to the top of the start menu as a UNC shortcut (i.e. not a mapped drive).  I seem to remember getting this to work in Vista was non-obvious, but I got it there somehow. 

I recently upgraded to Windows 7, and one of the things that was missing was my network drive shortcut.  After some playing around I managed to get it back there by doing the following:

• Create a shortcut to a random local folder, and place the shortcut somewhere you don’t mind keeping it.
• Drag the shortcut to the start menu where it will give you the option to pin it to the start menu. (The option to pin it to the start menu isn’t present on the right-click menu without some registry hacking).
• Right click on the shortcut, choose properties and change the name of the shortcut and the target location as desired.
• Job Done!

Of course, this could be how I did it in Vista as well?!?