Creating a VHD for multi-boot in Windows 7
Been doing this so much lately with all of the flavors of Windows 8, I figured I’d write this down for my own benefit, but also for anyone who’s interested in doing the same. Create a new VHD Go to Start, right-click on Computer and choose Manage Under Storage in the left pane, single-click Disk Management In the Actions pane on the right, click More Actions, then choose Create VHD Specify the location you want to store your VHD file (ex:…
Validating email string without using sp_OACreate in T-SQL
I wanted a way to validate that an email address in a SQL query was well-formed, and found a lot of resources suggesting to create a scalar function that invokes sp_OACreate among others, and return a bit indicating if it was valid or not. That works great, but not for those of us in heightened security environments, where granting execute permissions to system stored procs and functions is not permitted. After searching around I came up with the following function:…
Get the first occurrence of a character in SQL
(Originally posted September 2, 2009) When I need to know the first (or any) occurrence of a character, I’m used to saying something like InStr() for VB or ASP, or String.IndexOf() in .Net, but when I tried to do something like this in SQL for a substring portion of a query I was creating, those obviously aren’t available. In Oracle InStr is available, but we`re talking about SQL. To get the first occurrence of a character in a TEXT field (emphasis…
Enabling editing of SQL 2000 DTS in SSMS 2008 R2
We have some old SQL 2000 DTS Packages that we still maintain, and I’m not continuing to install SQL Enterprise Manager on future versions of my OS just to edit these things, I should be able to edit them in SSMS right? Well, yes, but it requires a couple of steps, that so far in my Google research is never complete…it’s always a part of the entire solution. (PINTA) Well, here’s the entire solution: First, go to http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=11988 and download/install the SQLServer2005_BC.msi…
Custom presence in Lync 2010
I enjoyed using custom presence in Communicator 2007, but when our enterprise switched to Lync 2010 a few months ago, my custom presence migrated through until I switched to a new PC, then the old method of enabling custom presence failed. Why? One registry entry… Here’s how to do it: Create a string key in HKCUSoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftCommunicator called CustomStateURL and give it a value of the path to an OCS presence XML file, such as file:///c:/program files/Microsoft Office Communicator/OCSPresence.xml Now, also…