Changing all database table’s owner back to DBO

One of the niggling that often happens when your deployed to a cheap shared hosting environment is having your table owners change on you. If you have created a data access layer that references tables using their long name this is an issue. This can be caused by a deployment script not maintaining user permissions on your tables or maybe you’re using a web console to interract with you database like myLittleAdmin and it doesn’t allow you to create a table under any user but your own.

Twitterify your strings using c# regex

So you’ve set up a twitter feed on your site – sweet. Now all your peeps can see how excited you are about the new limited edition Whitney Houston EP you’ve been listening to. But then you post a link – or a reply to a fellow twitterati member and those handy auto links you’ve become so used to aren’t there. Bummer duuude – lets fix that.

Exchange 2010: Fix broken Out of office replies

After my recent service roll-up for Exchange 2010 users who were homed on one of my servers where unable to set their out-of-office replies on. After some quick troubleshooting it would appear that the service roll-up had reset some of the permissions on some of my Exchange IIS virtual directories.

Stopping Windows from updating dynamic DNS

Under certain conditions there are times when you have a machine in your domain that you don’t want to update its DNS A records. These are usually edge cases however the need is still there. I needed to do this recently, so as they say on Law and Order in a robotic Stephen Hawking voice - “These are their stories”

Manually testing SMTP mail issues via Telnet

So this may be a post that exists in a million places on the web if you know where to look, however it would appear that whenever i do this a colleague gets the idea that i am channelling black magic. How does one “debug” a mail server connection – this is as easy as 123.

Why it’s FireFox, not IE that should be worried about Chrome

When Chrome was first launched by Google, and the media found out about it, they proposed that Google had Microsoft firmly in it’s sights and was potentially about to start a new browser war, i beg to differ in my opinion on this. Internet Explorer has one major advantage that no other browser has, and for the near future at least, will continue to have: locked in marketshare in enterprise and all new copies of Windows. Internet Explorer will never be crushed. No matter how crap Internet Explorer becomes, it has the (some may say unfair, but i believe that’s life) advantage of already being installed 90% of the time. So who should really be afraid of Chrome spreading its wings? Apple and Mozilla and if you still care: Opera.

How to use the Not-so-new MailSettingsSectionGroup

Today i came across something that from my day-to-day coding i have noticed a lot of my fellow coders at work/play have let slide on their path to .Net Mecca – using the MailSettingsSectionGroup section of the web.config to specify both SMTP server host details as well as they other properties such as user/pass credentials in a central, single, easy to use manner. So I'll take this opportunity to make it as easy as possible for you to use.

Manually publishing Internet Explorer 6 for use with Windows XP Mode

For those of you kiddies loving you Windows 7 goodness you may have discovered that from a web development point of view having an Internet Explorer 6 installation without much hassle is a pretty cool thing. Although the fact that you have to launch Windows Xp mode up and can’t use it as a “native” application by launching it from within Windows 7 is a bit of a let down. Let’s fix that :)