Attended a one day conference in Copenhagen today.
Great presentations of VS2010, .NET 4.0, MVC 2.0 and Silverlight 4 by Scott Guthrie. 

Attended TechEd Europe in Berlin.
Good conference – but a bit thin on developer stuff compared to earlier years (in Barcelona).
Next year I think I might go to the PDC in the USA instead – too bad there isn’t a PDC Europe.

I’m in Berlin (at Microsoft’s TechEd conference) and joined the “mauerfall” party monday night at the Brandenburg Gate.
Although I got a nasty cold from the rain, this was an exciting experience and I’m very happy to have been part of it:

Back from my first time at the JAOO conference in Århus (Denmark).

Great conference – a bit heavy on Java for a .NET developer like me, but otherwise a great mix of different content.
And all executed very professionally.

Thanks to Trifork and everybody else for a great time and a lot of new inspiration.

I have been running Windows 7 RTM on my Vaio (VGN-Z21WN) since it was released on MSDN, and everything has been working pretty smooth – except for an annoying problem with the display driver.
If I installed the NVIDIA driver (the Vista 32 bit driver from Vaio’s support site), the brightness controls would not work (neither the FN keys nor the slider in Windows power settings).
If I removed the NVIDIA driver (leaving a “standard VGA driver” with a yellow exclamation mark in the device manager), the brightness controls would work fine, but then the computer sleep function no longer worked, and the computer would always hibernate instead of sleeping (when closing lid or pressing power button) – which is a lot slower but shutting down and restarting, and bad for my SSD.

Today I finally found a solution, which I thought I’d share here in case anyone else out there runs into the same problem (I googled a LOT for this, and found nothing).

With the NVIDIA driver installed, in the Windows Device Manager, right-click and disable the NVIDIA adapter (do not uninstall it – just disable it). Leave the Mobile Intel… adapter enabled:

AND in the Windows Services list stop and disable the NVIDIA Display Driver Service – otherwise the display adapter (Device Manager) will be re-enabled every time the computer is restarted:

I expect this configuration might be a problem if I ever need to connect an external monitor/projector (haven’t tried that yet), but then it should be simple enough to temporarily enable the NVIDIA display adapter.

Having heard so many good things about SSDs (solid state disks), a few months I decided to try one out on my laptop – a Dell M4400 at the time.
So I got a Patriot Warp v. 3 256GB SSD, backed up the old disk (a standard 7200rpm 250GB disk) and restored it to the new SSD.
This appeared to work very nicely at first (quiet, quick boot etc.), but soon the laptop started taking long breaks where it practically froze, apparently doing some kind of disk activity (as per the HD light).
This might have had something to do with the Intel controller SATA settings and some weird restore partition that the Dell laptop was born with, but I never figured it out and eventually put the original hard disk back in to get some work done. And the SSD ended up in the drawer :-(

Then last week at the local mall I came across this cute little Sony Vaio Z21 laptop – which I just had to have.
It is light (1,5 kgs), great screen (13.1” 1600x900), Core2 Duo 2.53GHz, and 4GB RAM, and looks great too.
The hard disk however was a bit slow - 5400prm standard. So this was a perfect opportunity to try the SSD again.

After a few failed attempts (blue screen of death) at installing Windows 7 RC on the Vaio / SSD, the Windows installer suddenly claimed that the computer had no hard disk at all.
I tried with Windows 7 RC, Vista, several older Windows versions, and various disk partitioning utilities, but none of them recognized the disk anymore.

After a lot of googling, I finally found “Super FDisk” from http://www.ptdd.com/. A free utility delivered as a downloadable ISO image for burning a bootable CD.
Visually it reminded me of the good old Windows 3.1 days, but it worked wonders!
After deleting some weird looking disk partitions using this tool, the SSD appeared to be reborn.
The Windows 7 RC installer now recognized the SSD, and installed flawlessly on the first attempt. I have been running this 3-4 days now as so far it has been great (writing this in Windows Live Writer on the Vaio).

So thanks very much to the Super FDisk people for making (and giving away) this brilliant tool!

Dell M4400	Patriot Warp v. 3 256gb
Vaio Z21	Vaio Z21

Went to a fantastic outdoor concert with Bruce Springsteen in Herning (Denmark) last night.
He rocked the place for 3 hours straight and looked like he could continue for twice that long – I almost felt sorry for the E-Street Band who got no breaks at all.

It had been a cloudy and rainy day right up to 20:15 when Bruce and the band went on stage and the sun broke through the clouds for a perfect evening with great music and atmosphere.

Thanks Boss!

We've always wanted to host our Internet servers from our own office. Besides from providing more control, security, and privacy, this is also just much easier and more convenient as we are constantly tweaking and developing our web-sites.
However, until now it hasn't been possible to get a decent business Internet connection in our location (Frederikshavn, Denmark). The best the phone companies could offer was ~5Mb/512Kb consumer grade ADSL.
So we've always been forced to host our web-sites in remote data centers - most recently in Kansas, USA.

So when a new player, BredbaandNord, offering fiber Internet connections turned up on the local scene this spring, we jumped at it.
A few weeks ago we got our 50Mb/50Mb business grade fiber connection installed, and just got done moving everything from Kansas to a brand new Dell PowerEdge T300 (Xeon Quad-core / 16GB RAM) running Windows Server 2008 64bit sitting right here in our attic.

Here are a few photos (click for larger versions):

Fiber coming into our building:

In our attic, this guy converts the fiber to Ethernet:


About 3 km (2 miles) from here, the other end of our fiber goes in this "hut" - the local hub:


Inside the hut, a technician is hooking up our fiber:


Hmmmm.... which one was it now?


Back in our attic, the new PowerEdge server is happily serving this blog and all our other web-sites:


And of course the server and fiber converter has one of these (battery) in case power should ever fail:

Just thought I'd share this if someone else encounters the same problems I did trying to use this class.

The documentation for the .NET HttpListener class states that a Prefix host name + is similar to * without going into any further details.
There is actually a pretty big difference between the two.

There is also no mention of what happens when you specify an IP addresses as the host name (weak wildcard).

The full explanation is found in the MSDN documentation for the "HTTP Server API" under "UrlPrefix Strings".
See http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa364698(VS.85).aspx

DNSreport.com is a great tool for quickly analyzing a domain name registration and setup.
I have personally used it for many years, and still use it almost daily to check various domain names etc.

However about a year ago DNSreport.com became a paid service.
I perfectly understand that they need to finance their servers etc. and I am happy to pay the membership fee, especially since I use it as much as I do.
But a lot of people were unhappy about this because they didn't use the service enough to justify paying for a membership, and there weren't any good alternatives around.

Simple DNS Plus users have often asked us to provide a similar service or tool - or if we knew of any alternatives.
We do provide several free on-line DNS diagnostics tools - see http://www.simpledns.com/addons.aspx#online
But nothing as comprehensive as DNSreport.com.

Today I stumbled on a web-site called "intoDNS.com" which provides a free domain name report very similar to DNSreport.com.
The site is still in beta but looks very promising.

So if you can't justify paying for DNSreport.com - check out http://www.intoDNS.com