A website to Make Live Tiles for your website

 Smartphones, Windows 10, Windows 8 Tablet  No Responses »
May 282015
 

Just stumbled on this website today, which may come in handy for people that are wanting to help those people with Windows 8 or Windows 10 as well as Windows Phone. This site will help you to create the ability for your site to make a live tile on those devices. That way if a person wants to pin your site to their Start Screen then it will use the icon you set and will also do some live tile stuff making use of your rss feed. It may not be a widely used feature but some of your visitors may appreciate you adding it. You could even use this to make a home page or a jump page for yourself and make one of these tiles and pin it to your phone’s start screen and have a pseudo home page using an icon of your choosing. You just need to set the icon you want and the title and maybe the rss feed and then download the zip file and extract it and upload to the folder your site is in and add the code to your webpage and that is it.
http://www.buildmypinnedsite.com/en

I have also installed Windows 10 on my HTC One M8

 Smartphones, Windows 10  No Responses »
May 282015
 

Ok, I have taken the plunge and installed Windows 10 on my M8, it definitely feels more like a beta than it does for my tablet or laptop. There are some issues with how things look and there are some really slow spots in it as well, seems like mainly when trying to go back to the Start screen and when resuming from an app. I have also noticed that apps and windows seem to stay open after you click the back button, so after a few minutes of using it you could have loads of windows open that you would need to press and hold the back button to close them. The mail app is getting very close to what is on the tablet and laptop, swipe to delete etc. It also seems like the settings area is much better looking than it used to be in WP8.1, although it seemed to look more like a phone settings before. I do not think it is for the feint of heart to install this on your main phone, but it is nice to use it for the most part. There is a setting for having more buttons visible, but I could not get it to take setting it back to do not show more tiles. Another thing about this version, what are they going to call it? It seemed like it would be Windows Phone 10 since that was just the continuation of names through WP7 and WP8, then it seemed like it would be Windows 10 since it was all the same code base, now it seems like it may be Windows 10 Mobile, resurrecting the Windows Mobile from the Windows Mobile 6 days.
One thing I did notice was after the installation happened I saw an update for WP8.1 in my phone updates and could not get it to go away, until I went back in the Windows Insider app and set the setting back to Fast Track, which I had set before so I could get the update in the first place. Once I did that the WP8.1 update disappeared and I have been seeing Windows 10 updates showing up. Speaking of updates, it seems one thing they have not finished yet is a way to force a restart if you happen to miss the window telling you about the restart, I have seen it a couple of times and sometimes it shows up in the update area as a button, but if something goes wrong there is no way to force the restart, and I do not think holding the power button is a legit way to restart.

An issue I had this weekend with Windows 10 TP on my Dell Venue 8 Pro

 Software, Windows 10, Windows 8 Tablet  No Responses »
May 042015
 

I have been running Windows 10 Tech Preview for quite a while now on my Dell Venue 8 Pro and I still love it and use it daily. Granted, I do not do many wildly demanding tasks but I do use it to listen to Pandora and to read ebooks and some other simple stuff and I am really digging it. This weekend, though, I had an issue which I guess started after an update was applied and a reboot occurred, my tablet booted to the login screen, after I logged in it went to just a black screen, I actually made it start up in recovery one time and had it drop back to an earlier build and it booted right up, then I guess the updates came in again and the following morning it was back to the black screen. This time I could not get recovery mode started no matter what I tried. I did have an external keyboard, non-bluetooth, hooked up and could get it to start task manager. No matter what I tried the programs I tried to fire off did not fire up, like cmd or control or even msconfig, everything just did not show up…..explorer wouldn’t even start up. So I figured I would use my backup to go back to an old build, as soon as I plugged in the USB drive while at the task manager the programs I tried to start actually started to fire up. Then the tablet rebooted, I guess to try to fire off the Backup Recovery app, my tablet has been booting fine ever since. I have no idea why it actually worked, but thought I would share my experiences just in case someone else had issues like this. I am on the fast track for getting updates which is probably part of my issue, but it is just my tablet and it is not mission critical.

EDIT (5/5/2015): Ok, seems that this issue has happened again, but task manager could at least fire up control panel, I had 3 updates that were installed and one of them was KB3061162, which I could not find any info on. I uninstalled it just to see and my tablet booted right up as it should have, weird, but hey it is a Beta…preview…or whatever it is now. Still do not think it is bad enough to go back to Windows 8.1.

Later

Issue with SQL Server and utilizing Linked Servers

 Application Development, Software, SQL Server, Web Development  No Responses »
May 042015
 

I just wanted to pass along some information I just figured out accidentally. We utilize SQL Server at my work to house a rather large amount of data over about 4 SQL Servers, 3 were Virtual and 1 was an actual physical server. This weekend we moved the physical server to a virtual one and most everything just worked out of the box. When we tried to use some of the advanced features that required linked servers those features worked for some and not others, it seemed when we tried to use the newly made virtual server to a schema on itself it failed. We tried everything to make it work and since it was not working, we assumed we would need to change 100s of lines of code to remove the server part from the connection string when it was referencing the same server. We even tried creating a new linked server on this server to connect to itself, which of course failed due to it being the same server. All of the servers were SQL 2008s.

What did actually work was using a box that was VPN’d in which is running SQL 2008R2 to create a linked server on that same server, by starting SMSS on the VPN’d box and connecting to the server in question and going down to Server Objects then to Linked Servers and right clicking and adding linked server, and using the Server in question’s name in the server to connect to box and going through the security stuff and pressing Ok. Now when we want to use the linked box features they work as they always have when it was a separate physical box.

 

Hope that helps someone else out there that may face the same issue.

Later

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