No, I'm not trying to get away!  I was working in C# last night and learned some new things related to string escaping.  We all know about \n (carriage return) and \t (tab), but did you know about the @ (at) sign?If you place the "at" in front of a string, you can use backslashes without doubling them.  As an example, if you wanted to reference a file path in code, you would typically need:string path = "c:\\Path\\OtherPath\\File.ext";This is tedious, so MS decided to allow you to avoid that.  Instead you can use:string path = @"C:\Path\OtherPath\File.ext";Pretty nice looking.  Really, it's...

I did.  I needed 50 or so.  I got 2,000.  For one dollar.  Yeah!Every so often, I need a collection of names and addresses for testing or demo purposes.  Microsoft has an internal list of ficticious names (all taken from employees who apparently sign some paper), but no addresses.  Intel has no such list whatsoever.  I Googled "fake name generator" on a whim, and my first hit was www.fakenamegenerator.com.  This site offers names of eleven nationalities, and even generates maiden names, birthdates, credit card numbers, addresses and phone numbers!  Addresses can be in one of 18 countries.  You can change...

So I was helping out on a project involving MIIS 2003.  I needed to write a password extension to propagate password changes from Active Directory to a legacy SQL application.  It was obviously not working, but I couldn't tell why.  The Event Log would indicate the Password Change Notification Service (PCNS) sending out the change, then MIIS would attempt to send it to the appropriate management agent (using the password extension), but then it would show this error:An unexpected error has occured during a password set operation.  "BAIL: MMS(3240): passwordext.cpp(306): 0x80131509 BAIL: MMS(3240): passwordext.cpp(735): 0x80131509 BAIL: MMS(3240): export.cpp(5959): 0x80131509 BAIL:...

Renaming a lot of files can be a real pain.  A post on Greg Duncan's blog reminded me of my favorite, simple called Flexible Renamer.  It hasn't been updated in awhile, and the rest of the site's Japanese, but it works really well, and has functions for images, music, and other files, with support regular expressions.  All operations are real-time previewed before the renaming operation takes place, and several renaming templates are included.  It's definitely worth a look if you ever try to rename files enmasse:http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA014830/english/FlexRena

If you have a blog, sign up, upload an image, and link to it in an entry.  Then, link to your blog entry here.This photo is from Fourth of July fireworks in Coralville, Iowa.  A nice time was had by all!