Exploding Coder

...no matter what try/catch I put in my user code, I couldn't catch this exception with the debugger. Visual Studio would halt execution every time with "Exception unhandled by user code"...

There may be a day when Microsoft realizes that rebooting a server after trivial security updates is too much hassle. Or, that undistinguished, yet business critical, third party application's memory leak just never gets fixed, forcing you to reboot weekly to prevent an outage. As a Windows sysadmin, unless you plan on migrating all your server applications to Unix, you're stuck rebooting your servers periodically. I came up with a way to issue reboots via ad-hoc or a scheduling tool to remotely reboot servers and ensure they are back online.

I recently found the need to configure Outlook 2003 for thousands of corporate users to use preferred address book settings instead of the defaults. As anyone in a large corporate environment may know, the defaults are set such that when composing an email, name resolution checks all address lists in Exchange in alphabetical order by list, then name. When an organization is many tens of thousands large, resolving "Smith" will inevitably find conflicts.

One of the greatest ideals of high level programming is the idea of code reuse. In the old days, this was only ever done using functions or subroutines, depending on the language. In later days, this was performed as object oriented design. Every language seems to accomplish these ideals in various ways to accomplish a similar goal.

My name is Shawn Poulson. I currently reside in the growing town of Middletown, Delaware with my wife, son, and our great dane.

As an IT guy, I look to using computers to solve some of my day to day problems. I say computers in plural because I readily use two at home and one at work, and I could also be in the internet cafe near my work. For instance, I store my personal passwords and other sensitive information in Crypt File Manager. It stays secure by encryption in such a way that not even my web host provider can access the data and the password is not stored anywhere on the web server or browser. This solution works great because I can access it wherever I want with only a web browser.

Microsoft recently launched a new event in cities across the US to showcase Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008 with tracks geared towards developers and admins. The event is free and you get free eval copies of the stuff. So, why the hell wouldn't you want to take a day off and go?

http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/register/default.mspx

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Shawn Poulson and I am a freelance developer and system administrator. I've studied all things computers and programming since the 80's.

The internet has long been a wealth of information in my field.

And here it is. Drupal was extremely easy to setup and configure. Now, with a decent CMS in place, I plan to write out whatever useful development related material I come across. Feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed to follow my updates.