The Blog

Installing Windows 8 on an HP TouchSmart IQ800 Series

Family, Life, Technology, Touch Screen Computing, TouchSmart by on

I have one of those first generation all-in-one HP Touchsmart computers (the IQ824 CTO to be exact) wall mounted in my kitchen, and I’ve been super happy with it, and gotten more use out of it than I ever could have imagined. It came installed with Windows Vista, and I  upgraded it to Windows 7 when that came out and worked out a bunch of kinks. With the Windows 8 RTM, I decided to see if I could get some more mileage out of it and figure out if this Windows 8 touch experience could give it some new life.

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UAC and Windows 8

Windows 8, UAC, Visual Studio, and always Run as Administrator

ASP.NET, SharePoint, Technology by on

One of the biggest kinks I’ve had to work out so far on Windows 8 is fighting with UAC. Since I do a lot of SharePoint 2010 development, I need to run Visual Studio as an Administrator in order for the SharePoint tools in Visual Studio to work properly. After using Windows 8, I quickly found out that you can’t completely disable UAC in Windows 8. Continue Reading →

IE10, Windows 8, and SharePoint PeoplePicker Resolution

Technology by on

PeoplePicker Dialog

After installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 8 RTM, I noticed that the SharePoint PeoplePicker wouldn’t seem to resolve my service accounts. Everything would have a red underline.

After scratching my head for a bit, I realized the PeoplePicker actually did resolve the names properly, it was just that the damned IE10 spell checker was underlining the service account name with almost the exact same underline that is used when SharePoint can’t resolve a name! The clue was when I tried to resolve myself, and I saw that only my last name was underlined. Don’t let it fool you folks!

PeoplePicker Dialog

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Add an SSL Warning to Custom Central Administration Pages

SharePoint, Technology by on

I recently created a custom service application administration page which collected a username and password of a service account. I wanted to display a warning to the user if they were not on a secure HTTPS channel, similar to the one that SharePoint provides when you attempt to start the User Profile Synchronization service. In looking at the out of box pages in the ADMIN directory, the code that SharePoint uses is quite simple:

<div id="SslWarning" style="color:red;display:none">
<SharePoint:EncodedLiteral runat="server" text="<%$Resources:wss,SSL_warning%>" EncodeMethod="HtmlEncode"/>
</div> 
<script language="javascript">
if (document.location.protocol != 'https:') { 
var SslWarning = document.getElementById('SslWarning'); SslWarning.style.display = ''; 
}
</script>

Panorama of Mt. St. Helens

Life, Sports by on

Here is a link to a panorama I took of Mt. St. Helens from the south side, near the Lahar viewpoint. I had never been to that side of the mountain before, and it was well worth the long trip. The views of the mountain were incredible, and there were several excellent hikes, including Ape Cave, Ape Canyon, Lava Canyon (with an awesome suspension bridge ala Indiana Jones for the kids), June Lake and more. It is also National Forest land, so you can pretty much camp anywhere you want. We just pulled over off the road near Lahar and found a nice secluded spot.

The panorama is of 31 separate photos that I took with the rapid shoot settings on a Nikon D5000. I didn’t have a tripod, just held the camera still as I panned manually. The Microsoft Image Composite Editor did a great job stitching the photos together.