Tip of the Week - Multicoring

Never has programming for multiple cores been easier as with the Task Parallel Library (TPL) for .NET. Make sure to check out this simple introduction to see the power and ease of use the TPL brings to make your code ready for multi core support.

Tip of the Week - Visual WPF Debugging

This weeks tip goes out to all the WPF developers out there:
Mole II is a graphical debugger for WPF and once used you won't know how you could ever live without it. A must have tool for the tool belt of every serious WPFer.

Tip of the Week - Throwing up

Came from the java world and never kicked that throwing habit? Do you catch with "catch (Exception up)" and don't know an alternative to "throw up"? Read this little post on re-throwing an exception in different ways and how it affects your stracktrace.

Moving the System Partition in Vista

I recently ran into problems when I tried to remove an old hard drive from my system. Unknowingly when installing Vista it somehow choose that old hard drive as the right place to put the system partition and not my shiny new drive (on which the Vista installation resided anyway). So when removing the old disc I could no longer boot. This is how to solved that problem:

Symptoms:
You can easily check if your system partition resides on the disc you want to remove by either checking in the partition manager if that disc is marked with "system partition" or by checking if the disc contains the hidden bootmgr file and boot folder in the root folder and your other disc does not.

Solution:
We have to make the right disc bootable by copying the correct boot management data from the old disc.
Follow the instructions from here to copy all relevant data. What will most likely fail though is copying the BCD files from the boot folder. We have to use "bcdedit" to do that. Simply go to the command prompt in the C:/boot folder of the disc you want to boot from (if not C: change accordingly) and enter "bcdedit /export BCD". This should copy all relevant boot management data. Now you should have all you need and can try booting from that disc.
If the boot was successful run "bcdedit" again, if an error message is displayed copy the "BCD" files (including the BCD.log) files from the old disc to the new one and you should encounter no further problems while happily booting without your old disc.
Good luck

Tip of the Week - Connection Strings

In the first part of our weekly installment we bring you: Connection Strings

Do you forget them? Do you just use them without knowing what they actually do? Do you want to embrace dozens of new ones? Then ConnectionStrings.com is where you should go immediately. Hundreds of connection strings for you to forget till tomorrow.