December 2009 Entries

Activation errors when installing Office 2010 Beta

I decided to replace my Office 2010 Technical Preview with the Beta, which was released in November and I ran into an error with activation. Since I didn’t see this really documented on the net (it probably is, but I couldn’t find it), I decided to write up my experience. When I first tried to install the beta, I got an error saying that I had to first uninstall the technical preview. Ok, no problem. After uninstalling the tech preview, I installed the beta. It never prompted me for a license key...

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Posted On Tuesday, December 22, 2009 6:17 PM | Feedback (1)

Virtual PC in Windows 7 – fonts look bad?

After installing Windows 7 and learning how to use the new Virtual PC, I noticed something odd with the way fonts were occasionally displayed in Visual Studio. It took some testing, but I figured out that if I ‘Enabled Integration Features’ with VPC, then ClearType wouldn’t be enabled. It would look like this: With integration features disabled, it looked like this: These screen shots don’t show how different the two look when you’re actually using it. The most noticeable piece is the ‘W’ in the...

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Posted On Tuesday, December 15, 2009 7:41 PM | Feedback (0)

SharePoint 2007: The template you have chosen is invalid or cannot be found

I ran into an error at work recently when I went to deploy my new SharePoint site, which was a site definition inside a SharePoint solution file. I was deploying the site to our build server. I added the WSP to the farm, deployed it to the web app, and then went to create the new site based on my template. However, I got an error almost immediately, after clicking create. The error was “The template you have chosen is invalid or cannot be found”. I check to make sure that the solution had been deployed...

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Posted On Friday, December 11, 2009 12:12 PM | Feedback (0)

Simplifying your tech life, step 1: declutter your computer

I’ve been building my own machines for a while now and I’ve gotten into a routine of installing certain apps when I do I rebuild. I’ll not only grab the latest Microsoft updates, plus Office, but I’ll also install a whole list of utilities. This list keeps growing and was often something like the following: PDF reader (I go back and forth between FoxIt Reader and Adobe) FireFox and Chrome Instant messengers (MSN, GoogleTalk, Skype) Tweetdeck Live Mesh Some kind of free antivirus (Microsoft’s Security...

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Posted On Sunday, December 06, 2009 9:40 PM | Feedback (2)

Cloud backup saves the day

I’ve had a rash of hard drive failures at home recently. In one case, having a backup of the files in the cloud, saved me from losing 40 gigs of data. The first hard drive that went bad was one that I was using with my Media Center PC. I had repurposed an internal drive from my server by putting it into a USB drive enclosure. Media Center was using it to store the recorded TV video files. Since these files weren’t that critical, I wasn’t worried about backing them up. When this drive failed, Media...