Had a very odd problem this week, i’m sure it must have happened to someone before.
We moved an 2k active directory domain controller from one (logical) site to another. This had the very strange knock on effect of causing the domain DFS (distributed file system) to start acting strangely.

First of all, some machines (XPsp1, XPsp2, 2003 server) could not access the DFS root at all. They got a error message along the lines of:

‘Configuration information could not be read from the domain controller’

Then some machines could see the DFS root, but some of the shares where missing. I tried re-creating the shares but this had no effect.

I then rebooted the Domain controller that was the PDC emulator and that did nothing. There wasn’t anything suspect I could see in any of the FRS logs, so as a stab in the dark I restarted the DFS service (I didn’t even realise there was one!) on all the domain controllers in the domain, and it worked!
I have know idea why this happened and cant find anything online as to what caused it, so anyone with any ideas let me know.

Also installed MS Sharepoint 3.0 this week. Looks quite funky not really done much with it yet. If i find out anything that might be of interest ill post it here.

Oh, and check out the new Apple iPhone here www.apple.com/iphone I know some smart phones will do similar things already, but this does look mighty cool.

First of all happy new year to everyone. Probably like most people I started the year with a hangover. Not helped by the fact I had to get up at half 8 to take my girlfriend to work!

Just a quick post for something useful I found, I wanted to change a name (ie joe bloggs) so that the first letters would be upper case. I found the VbStrConv class. It contains lots of good methods for string manipulation.
The one I needed was VbStrConv.ProperCase

Dim strNameAs String = “joe bloggs”
strNameAs = StrConv(strNameAs , VbStrConv.ProperCase)

I’ve had a problem with inserting sub reports into a cell of a table. Every time I inserted the sub report into a cell. The size of the report ballooned out of control and i couldn’t work out why.

Well i’ve found out, and its kind of obvious really, the size of the sub report was too large! I kept thinking it was the size of the filed on the sub report, but then i finally realized the entire report was being inserted not just the filed.

I cant believe I didn’t sus that one out right away!

I was looking for a way of creating a preview of a pdf document on a web based app, and I came across PDFThumbnail.NET. (Details here).

Its a free asp.net control, that will take a pdf stream and output a jpeg preview onto a page. Its free, easy to use and fast. Also they answered a couple of questions I had on the product very quickly.
There doesn’t seam to be many components kicking around for free like this, so i’d highly recommend it.