I love my Dell D820 notebook but was rather annoyed to find that after I switched to Vista Business 64Bit I no longer had all the touchpad options I had with XP. Dell for whatever reason decided not to include (or overlooked) the Alps driver for Vista 64Bit. Turns out the almost (if not) identical Dell Precision Mobile WorkStation M65 does have support for the 64Bit Alps touchpad and its driver works great on the D820. Get it from Dell's web site at http://support.dell.com by searching the M65 drivers. At the time of this writing it is available directly from Dell at this page.

...or at least it used to. You just finished up that new web application and deployed it to a subdirectory of another .Net app. It worked flawlessly on the dev machine but now you receive the dreaded error message. What happened? Chances are your new app is inheriting configuration setting from the parent app. One fix is to clear or override every offending config setting in the child apps web.config. For instance if your parent app has a setting <pages styleSheetTheme="Red"... but your sub app does not use a styleSheetTheme then you will get an error that the Red theme cannot be found because it has propagated from the parent config. An easy fix is just to specify the non-existent theme in your sub web.config; <pages styleSheetTheme=""... now it's looking for no theme and you have no error.

What if you have 10 or 20 directives that need to be overridden? Wrap the entire section of the config with inheritInChildApplications="false".

<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">
    <system.web> 
<!--anyhing here should not be inherited-->
    </system.web>
</location>

Now go buy a new hairbrush with all the money you saved not buying Rogaine :)

Several months back I was working on an application that I wanted to achieve SSO on. Identical Machine Key Validation was a must. I used an online generator that I found through a Google search. I have once again needed this and could not find the link. After some searching I stumbled across it again. I am now posting it here for the benefit of others as well as my future use. My blog's name is "My online shared memory space".  ; )

http://aspnetresources.com/tools/keycreator.aspx

MS SQL Server Management Studio Express fails to install with error code 29506 on Windows Vista.

To correct this situation simply run the MSI from the command line with administrator privileges.

Applies to Windows Vista installations where User Account Control is enabled (default).

After a format and re-installation of Windows XP on a clients computer, I installed SP3 from Windows Update. After reboot I proceeded back to Windows Update to find that it no longer functioned. I found a solution after some poking around on Google.

Grab the Windows Update Agent directly from Microsoft here. You will need to install the executable with the /wuforce option otherwise the install will fail stating that Windows Update is already installed.

Voila!! Windows Update is cured.