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Remote Desktop Connection Smart Sizing

If you use Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) a lot then you might be interested in an option that’s not available via the GUI. ‘Smart Sizing’ allows you to scale the screen to the size of the RDC window rather than the default option where the remote desktop gets cropped.

If you open a new RDC instance and expand the ‘Options >>>’ button you see the following screen :

At the bottom of the dialog is the option to ‘Save’ the current settings. Fill out as much as you normally would to connect to a remote box and then Save the file onto your local machine somewhere.

Edit that file with the text editor of your choice and add the following line to the bottom of the .rdp file you saved:

smart sizing:i:1

This will force RDC to scale the window when you shrink it and will stretch back to full screen when you click ‘Maximise’.

I create a collection of these .rdp files for each of the servers I need to communicate with and have a directory of them as a custom toolbar on my task bar.

Just remember to start your RDC session from your saved .rdp file to take advantage of the scaling trick

C# Abstract Exceptions

We’ve just been writing some new exceptions based initially on an abstract Exception class. When the attempt to write a catch statement to catch all exceptions which inherited from this abstract base class it wasn’t behaving as expected.

The gotcha here is that C#/.NET doesn’t allow you to catch exceptions from an abstract class. If you want to catch a base class Exception, avoid that abstract.

You have been warned! This is for .NET 2 by the way

Is Microsoft’s future ‘delicious’?

So have you had chance to see Microsoft’s (supposed) answer to Apple’s excellent Get A Mac adverts yet?

Well in case not, I’ve included it after the break. So I get the fact its got people talking because its obtuse, I get the fact that its not tying them to advertising one product but seriously have they thought about what this advert is saying?

Read the rest of this entry »

Ur clrd 2 lnd

In case you’ve not yet realised the business benefits of using SMS, then maybe this story from Ireland will help convince you.

The Irish Times wrote a story last Thursday about how an air traffic controller used SMS to guide a plane down safely.

He then lost audio telephone contact but the air traffic controller switched to texting and told the pilot that he had a primary radar signal on the aircraft and that Cork would allow them to land there. He then used texts to guide the 30-year-old plane in.

So maybe rethinking the usage of phones on planes needs revisiting? SMS might be small but it can be powerful. A bit like the Twitter story of the guy whose one word triggered a whole community response to his arrest in Egypt.

Powered by Elephants

Apparently this coffee is elephant powered. Well, made with Elephant Beans anyway.
Unlike that Kopi Luha (sp) whose beans have passed through the digestive system of a wild cat, I’m hoping these haven’t been fished out of some dung. I jest of course as it refers to the size of the beans.
It does make you start to question what your beverage has been through to get to your cup!

iPhone now blogs

So finally the application I’ve been missing has turned up on the Application Store. Wordpress from those lovely people at Automattic has provided a free app to blog direct to my self-hosted blogs. It’s a great first step and works really well.
I hope a future version will include an admin interface as well. So hello from Esendex Towers and me blogging from my iPhone!

Good morning and welcome from Clumber Street in Nottingham outside the O2 store. It’s nearly time and we’re quietly confident here at the front of the queue. I’m in 9th place so fingers crossed!

Mobile post from the Esendex BlogIt service

The Night before iPhone

Twas the night before Friday, when all through the house, the PC was crashing, couldn’t talk to its mouse.
The taxi was booked for 5:20 with care, with hopes that a 16Gb iPhone soon would be there.
His fiancee was nestled all snug in the bed, while visions of multitouch danced in his head.
And to ensure that the world would hear news bit by bit, he’s set up and using Esendex’s BlogIt!

Mobile post from the Esendex BlogIt service

ODear, no iPhone

It took me a while to spot my email from O2 this morning admittedly. The chance to pre-order a 3G iPhone for delivery on launch day on Friday. A perfect opportunity to avoid queuing for nothing before work. I was all excited and started to fill out the forms convinced that as I’d added a 16Gb iPhone to my shopping cart that I’d managed to secure one.
So as I was filling out my address details as a new customer I clicked next to find myself back on the online shop home page. Aaaaaargh! Not now, I thought. Further attempts brought up the maintenance page. So close yet so far. The shutter had com down too late and I waited for the site to come back up to be greated with the news that the 16Gb had sold out. What an utter shambles it was. This wasn’t a denial of service attack. This was a set of real or existing customers whose load they should have tested and predicted!
So now I have to take my chances on Friday to get one. Bad day O2, your website failed a prospective customer.

NMock Out Parameters

I’ve often thought that NMock is under-documented. The way I’ve started to learn how to use this extremely useful library is through the well-formatted examples that Ian has left around. Practical examples often show you far more than a glossary of terms or a list of available methods.

This week Andy and Drew were wanting to test a method which had both a return value and an out parameter. A quick look through the NMock Quickstart, Tutorial, Advanced or Cheat Sheet pages didn’t show any way of achieving this. Thankfully the Blogosphere came through once again to prove that you can do this with NMock.

Say you have a method in your mockable class called:

public string AddGreeting(string userName)

you could expect to write a Stub declaration such as

Stub.On(mockObject)
.Method(AddGreeting)
.With("World")
.Will(Return.Value("Hello World"));

If your method has an out parameter as well, such as:

public string AddGreeting(string userName, out int characterCount)

then your Stub declaration will need to look like this:

string expectedUserName = "World";
Stub.On(mockObject)
.Method(AddGreeting)
.With(Is.EqualTo(expectedUserName), Is.Out)
.Will(new SetNamedParameterAction(["characterCount", 11), Return.Value("Hello World"));

The Is.Out is setting the expectation that one of the parameters you're specifying is an Out parameter. The SetNamedParameterAction object is undocumented and has been found using reflection. This is a useful feature which hasn't been documented. The NMock project appears to being built using continuous integration these days but that obviously doesn't happen with the project documentation.
[Edited to update code sample to make use of Is.EqualTo() and explicitly declared variables for any non-out parameters in the method call. 18th Feb 2009]

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