Random writings, thoughts, tools, and ideas....

I have been spoilt for a long time by living in an Exchange environment, so when I recently had to use a POP3 environment (even if it was just temporarily), I felt like I had gone back 15 years. One of the reason it feels like I have gone from Vista to Windows 3.1, is that Exchange pushes the mail down (or at least that is how I appears to work – I’m no Outlook expert), so mail arrives instantly when someone sends it.
Unfortunately POP3 is pull based and it doesn't come down until Outlook checks for mail. The horrible part is that by default it is configured for only checking every 30 minutes :( That could mean if someone misses your check window (like they would know) you could wait almost forever for their mail. Thankfully you can change that, first go to Tools -> Options

Next go to Mail Setup and click the Send/Receive button.

By default you should have one group (called All Accounts) and below that there is an option to Schedule an automatic send/receive every x minutes. In the picture below you'll see it is set to 1 minutes, which really helps (close enough to instant that it doesn't matter).
However if you are like me then you also use Outlook for RSS feeds, and that change will mean you will now be downloading feeds every 1 min! You can fix that easily by splitting RSS and Emails check times
To do that click the Edit button and remove RSS from being included, then click OK. If you are a perfectionist (which you may gather I am from my picture below), you could also click Rename to understand what it is easier. Next click the New button and do not select to include Email, just RSS. Click OK and now you should have two Send/Receive groups. You can now click on RSS in the list and set a separate interval for how often it should check (once an hour is good).  Click Close, OK and you are done :)

Previously I posted about two ways to get SysInternals to your machine, well that great bunch have released yet another method! This time in a download package which contains all the tools and none of the fluff (so no BSOD screen saver)! This is a great addition for your toolbox! You can get it from here.
Thanks to Sarah for the heads up on this!

Earlier this year I attended a great event called Dev4Devs which is run by Microsoft on a Saturday morning at their offices and invites any developer to get up and present for 20mins! This is a great introduction into a lot of things as well as a great place to start if you want to become a presenter. Well it’s happening again in October! I will definitely be there so head over to Eben’s blog for more details.

IEs4Linux is the simpler way to have Microsoft Internet Explorer running on Linux (or any OS running Wine). No clicks needed. No boring setup processes. No Wine complications. Just one easy script and you'll get three IE versions to test your Sites. And it's free and open source.

Virtualisation is the way of the future, be it for demos or testing or production systems it is the future, and that means VHD files will be everywhere. However VHD files grow and grow and never shrink because of the way they are designed to work. For example if you put a 10Gb file on a VHD, it expands the VHD by 10Gb (for the disk) but if you delete a file the space of the VHD isn't reclaimed automatically.
This is pretty much ok for production systems (your VHDs live on a SAN with lots of disk or they should do for a lot of good reasons).
However if it's on your laptop for training/R&D or sending to customers being able to claim that disk space can be valuable and the advantage is it can be done manually so let me show you how it can be done in Hyper-V.
For this post I have a VHD which contains a MSSQL database (MDF and LDF) file on it, the disk space usage on the VHD for the drive looks like this:

So the VHD is supposedly a max of 300Gb and I have never copied that much on to it, and at the moment it contains a simple 53Gb and some change on it. The actual VHD file on my laptop looked like this, using a nice 117Gb of real disk space. So there is at least 64Gb I could get back!

The first step in shrinking the disk is to defrag it on the virtual machine, as the shrinking process only cleans space from the end of the disk. So if you have any data at the end like I did (see below) you'll need to (re)move it. Unfortunately as you can see I had an unfortunate "unmovable" piece of data conveniently at he end of the disk. Thankfully it turned out to be the LDF file for the SQL database.

So a quick truncate/empty of the LDF file (don't do that in production, but if you want to know how I did it see here) made it a lot easier to defrag the disk (especially) getting the data at the end freed up. Since I didn't have too much free time I skipped the defrag, so just working on the big (now) empty space available before the MDF (blue) file.

Step two is to shut down the VM, then go to the settings and go to the disk settings and click edit. This will bring up the disk edit wizard and the keep the first selected option, Compact.

This is very cool  because is actually loads the VHD as a disk on host operating system! In fact you can browse it and edit it (I would guess, but that may screw the compact up). This is similar to the VHDMount tool in Virtual Server. I am not sure how to do it manually in Hyper-V yet, because it would be really cool to be able to do that now.

After some time, let me rephrase that a significant amount of time, which in my case was a 6 odd hours,  it finished compacting the VHD file to 60Gb less!

This is a multi-part series. The other parts can be found at

• Slide.Show and SharePoint: Part II – Getting the data
• Slide.Show and SharePoint: Part III – Deploy and final config

This was inspired by a post on the IWSA group, about how to get a decent slide show in SharePoint using a picture library as a source. The poster went on to say he Slide.Show looked like it would meet his need and wondered if it could be used. For those who do not know Slide.Show is a cool Silverlight 1.0 component which takes a list of images and displays them as a slide show, with the presentation looking brilliant. Slide.Show has options like pausing, skipping the current image, viewing a grid of thumbnails so you select which one to skip to, and even a full screen view! It has in fact over 300 options you can tweak to get it just the way you like it!
/>If you don't know what SharePoint is, how is life under that rock? ;) SharePoint (or as it is officially known as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) is a cool system too, it has all kinds of functions for document management. One of them is a picture library but the downside of the picture library when displayed normally is a boring list or if you configure it one static picture… *YAWN*. So there is a perfect harmony just waiting occur!

But how can you use Slide.Show together with SharePoint? I wish it was as straight forward to add a web part in, but it isn't. That said it is not difficult to get up and running and requires a few tricks and thinking outside the SharePoint box to get up and running.

The first step is to add a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP), which can be found under the Miscellaneous section.    

The CEWP is interesting in that it allows you to set the content using rich text (ala Microsoft Wordpad like options) or actually put the HTML directly into it using the Source Editor option. Being able to put HTML directly in does not mean just HTML, but means that you can actually put anything in it and have total power of what will be rendered! Since we will be using a lot of JavaScript this is exactly what we need to use, to get Slide.Show into SharePoint.

The first step in getting this working is to get Slide.Show setup, so once you have downloaded the source package and extracted it you need to run the release.bat file which will combine a lot of JS files into two files in a release folder. You then need to take the release folder and place it in a folder under your SharePoint web site, which is definitely the cleanest way to configure it, but I preferred to take the Slide.Show folder (part of the files extracted) and place it under the SharePoint web site as it allows me to run some tests to make it easier to get the system setup correctly as in the screen shot below.

If you have also followed my thinking about taking the slightly messier config, you should be able fire up your favorite browser and type in http://<your website>/slide.show/samples/empty/default.html which should show you a pure black screen (right click and it should say Silverlight config). The point of that boring sample is that it just makes sure that the content is available, there is no server issues or client issues preventing it for working. Another simple test to check everything is configured correctly is to go to http://<your website>/slide.show/scripts/release/silverlight.js which should prompt to download it (like in the picture below).

Now that Slide.Show is configured correctly we will get back to the CEWP we now need to plop the code into it to make it work. Since the CEWP allows us to actually drop in any source, we will use that to put in the JavaScript we need for Slide.Show to work. This is where we lose the straight-forwardness of doing this, because if you thought you could follow the Slide.Show quick start guide and get it to work… you would be screwed. This is because we can't put in the <script> tags in the header of the page like the quick start guide tells us as SharePoint won’t let that happen. So our first step is to put our own code in to load and run the JS files and then we can then start using Slide.Show as normal.

To do this we first need a to tell the system that we will be running some JavaScript by a normal script tag:

Note: A complete version of the JavaScript is available at the end of the article without number to allow for easy copy and paste.

1: <script language="JavaScript"> 

1: // Provide the XMLHttpRequest
    class for IE 5.x-6.x:

2: if( typeof XMLHttpRequest == "undefined" ) XMLHttpRequest = function() {

3:   try { return new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP.6.0") } catch(e) {}

4:   try { return new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP.3.0") } catch(e) {}

5:   try { return new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP") } catch(e) {}

6:   try { return new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP") } catch(e) {}

7:   throw new Error( "This browser
        does not support XMLHttpRequest." )

8: };

For the following example we will just load one file, but when we are done we will need to repeat this for all our JS files:

1: var silverlightRequest = new XMLHttpRequest(); 

2: silverlightRequest.open("GET", "/slide.show/Scripts/Release/Silverlight.js", false); 

3: silverlightRequest.send(null); 

1: eval(silverlightRequest.responseText); 

1: new SlideShow.Control(); 

1: </script> 

1: new SlideShow.Control(new SlideShow.XmlConfigProvider({ url: "/slide.show/Samples/Flickr/configuration.xml" })); 

<script language=
"JavaScript"> 

// Provide the XMLHttpRequest class for IE 5.x-6.x:

if( typeof XMLHttpRequest == "undefined" ) XMLHttpRequest = function() {

 
try { return new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP.6.0") } catch(e) {}

 
try { return new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP.3.0") } catch(e) {}

 
try { return new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP") } catch(e) {}

 
try { return new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP") } catch(e) {}

 
throw new Error( "This browser does not support XMLHttpRequest." )

};

var silverlightRequest = new XMLHttpRequest(); 

 silverlightRequest.open(
"GET", "/slide.show/Scripts/Release/Silverlight.js", false); 

 silverlightRequest.send(
null); 

 eval(silverlightRequest.responseText); 

var slideshowRequest = new XMLHttpRequest(); 

 slideshowRequest.open(
"GET", "/slide.show/Scripts/Release/SlideShow.js", false); 

 slideshowRequest.send(
null); 

 eval(slideshowRequest.responseText); 

 
new SlideShow.Control(new SlideShow.XmlConfigProvider({ url: "/slide.show/Samples/Flickr/Configuration.xml" })); 

</script> 

• Update – 25 Sept 2008:  I have cleaned up this post a bit to make it easier to understand.
• Update – 26 Sept 2008: Added information/fix to get it to work on older IE versions.