Welcome to Salvo(z)

From time to time I have a need for a virtual com port, com port splitter, com port redirector (local and tcp),but most solutions I have found cost too much money. I’ve been able to get by using the named pipes redirection in Hyper-V for some of my projects. Yesterday I came across VSPE by Eterlogic, which offers every feature you could possible need, for FREE! There is a catch though, the 64-bit support costs $24.95, which they say is to cover the cost of the digital signing certificate required to sign their drivers for 64-bit Windows versions. I was able to try the software out on a 32 bit workstation, and it works as advertised. The next time I need something like this, and I’m developing on a 64-bit work station, I will not hesitate to purchase a license, even if it’s just for my home projects.

I have been a big fan of log4net for the past several years. It’s a light weight, reliable, open source logging platform. Today I needed to create FileAppender that created a log file that had the current date in ISO 8601 format.

Almost a year ago I found a script for a stored procedure that allowed you to compare two tables in SQL. Today I've been working on some data verification, and made really good use out of this script. I couldn't find it on my blog, so I don't think I've posted this before. Unfortunately, I did not save the original author of the script or where I got it from.

I came across a blog post yesterday that showed how you can debug SMTP in .Net without having an SMTP and receiving mail server setup. As long as you are using the System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient object, you do not have to change any code at all. All you need to do is add the following to the app/web config file.

I went to RDP into one of my local Hyper-V virtual machines this morning, only to find out I wasn’t able to connect. Browsing to the Hyper-V manager I saw that none of my VM’s were running. At first I couldn’t figure out why this was, until I remembered that my desktop machine was powered off this morning, indicating we had a brief power outage. The laptop, which obviously has a battery, was able to withstand the power outage, but the external hard drive, which requires external power was not. While I do have a UPS, it’s a piece of crap that never worked. Maybe now would be a good time to pick up another UPS on closeout from Circuit City, I’ll have to run that one past my manager.