Here is a step by step guide to turn on MSDTC on Windows 7. MSDTC settings are somewhat hidden in Windows 7 and I could not get to them as I did on Windows XP or Server 2003. I found a way and I’m putting it out here.
Step 1
Run dcomcnfg. This will open MMC [...]

This is one Machine to rule them all (I know Lord of Rings is so old school). In the Virtual Machine you will get the following.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Evaluation Edition x64, running as an Active Directory Domain Controller for the “CONTOSO.COM” domain with DNS and WINS
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise [...]

Running XP mode on Windows 7 requires Hardware Virtualization to be enabled. You set this through BIOS settings. But what if your machine does not support Hardware Virtualization. Yes such machines do exist and I have one. My SONY Vaio does not allow Hardware Virtualization. Why? Because it’s a SONY.
A good news for me and [...]

After using notepad++ for many years, I recently switched over to HippoEDIT as my preferred text editor. I find HippoEdit to be snappier than other text editor and the UI also looks appealing. Just wanted to give them a plug here.
Download HippoEDIT and see it for yourself.

ASP.NET 4 allows developers to customize Client Id which gets generated by ASP.NET. Up until now Client Id generated by ASP.NET has been ummm just plain ugly. Other than aesthetics they are also hard to work with in client side scripts. ASP.NET solves this issue to a degree by providing ClientIDMode property. In this post [...]

Channel 9 which happens to be my favourite media station now has a section for courses. And if you have downloaded Visual Studio 2010 then this is the place to get yourself some VS 2010 training. Topics covered in this online course are:

Managed Languages
ASP.NET 4.0
Data Platform
WCF & WF
Parallel Computing
ALM

Link to Visual Studio 2010 and .NET [...]

This post shows you how to use Breakpoints in Visual Studio with a hit count. Breakpoints can be described as bread and butter of debugging. They allow you to stop execution at any statement in your code. By doing this you can examine values in your variables, look at call stack, change values in variables [...]

This is a very smart commercial for Windows 7. A clever way to praise a product without taking a dig on others. Maybe Apple will learn a thing or two from this. Enjoy.

These days I am working on a personal project which I call “my precious”. This projects involves transforming XML documents into HTML using XSLT. Things were going smooth till I decided to output DOCTYPE from XSLT. This is what I did.
  
XSLT parser does not like the code above and gives me this error.

After [...]

Keynote for TechEd Australia started a bit slow with too much concentration on words such as innovation, excitement and productivity. Keynote was saved by awesome presentations by Sara Ford and Sarah Vaughan. Rest of the day was fantastic. A combination of excellent topics and superb presentation skills made it a worthy learning day.
The best [...]

Some of you may know that author of this site (that’s me in case you are thinking) is attending his first ever TechEd. TechEd to me is like woodstock for developers and other IT people who come in masses for this amazing and full of geek energy event. Over next few posts I will write [...]

This post shows you how to output data to a Console in a Windows Forms Application. I use this technique religiously when developing Windows Forms applications. Debugging is much simpler when you can see information on what your application is doing in a Console. Of course the onus is on you as developer to output [...]