Tentacle Software

TinyMCE is a great little WYSIWYG JavaScript text editor that we use quite often inside administration pages. It’s lightweight and just works out of the box. Well, except for the little issue of HTML encoding its output. When you submit an ASP.NET form that contains the TinyMCE text editor, you get this lovely message: A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client (ctl00$ContentBody$TextBoxBodyHtml="<p>Test!</p>"). Which is good, because that’s ASP.NET doing some checking and helping to protect your site from XSS attacks. The standard solution you see floating around the web...

Ran across this one today, and because it’s weird and annoying I thought I’d post a solution. You can thank me later! The problem goes like this: You’re using Visual Studio 2010 and trying to add a control to an APSX page in an ASP.NET Web Application targeted to .NET 4.0, and some controls don’t show up in IntelliSense. When you type the tag manually, Visual Studio complains that Element 'ListView' is not a known element. This can occur if there is a compilation error in the Web site, or the web.config file is missing....

Great video on Channel 9 with Fabian Uhse evangelising the “Vail” SDK. Confirms Microsoft’s commitment to Windows Home Server extensibility. Fabian hints that retail “Vail” will be running .NET 4.0 and not .NET 3.5, so we won’t have to wait for it to be pushed via Windows Update. Awesome.

The Windows Home Server “Vail” preview is here. There have been lots of in-depth technical reviews of the new and updated bits in Vail, which is not surprising given how anticipated the new version has been. Overview and Review (MediaSmartServer.net) Overview and Review (We Got Served) Drive Extender v2 (HomeServerLand) Drive Extender v2 (AnandTech) Remote Access (UWHS) Server and Client Backup (UWHS) The new functionality and improvements to the basic Windows Home Server...

These are actually pretty funny! Starting today, two, 30-second Windows Home Server commercials will run for 3 months throughout 25 different shows that are aired on Hulu. The videos were created to be metaphors of Windows Home Server, and convey 2 of the key features – Backup and Recovery, and using it as a Media Server.In the 30-second clips, Windows Home Server is described as a “Genie in the Box” who magically works to keep your data safe, and in one central location.

This isn't a WHS-related post, but I'm throwing this out to Google as a vote for a specific solution to a specific problem. If you're trying to copy some really large files from an OSX user, ones that don't fit on a FAT32 volume, use HSFExplorer. To transfer large files from an OSX machine to Windows, if you don’t want to mess around with Bootcamp drivers: Copy large files from the OSX machine to an HSF-formatted USB disk Plug USB disk into your Windows machine Run HSFExplorer and locate...

Feel like getting a free trip to PDC? If you’re a developer in New Zealand, Microsoft wants you to fill in a survey for a chance to win a trip to PDC in Los Angeles: If you’d like a trip to the Microsoft’s next Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, simply fill out our survey and you will go into the draw! We are really interested in your opinions – so we can better communicate with you and where possible tailor international resources and information for you....

The Windows Home Server Team Blog has a post up announcing the release of the Japanese version of the WHS SDK, and a Japanese WHS trial download to go along with it. The Windows Home Server team is very pleased to announce the availability of the Japanese Software Development Kit (SDK).  The SDK provides developers with guidance, for example application programming interface (API) information, on how to create programs that integrate with the Windows Home Server Console. The Japanese SDK can be found here, and the trial here. Here’s hoping this sparks another round...

Brendan Grant at Microsoft has provided an answer to a question we get about WHS Disk Management fairly often: Why are internal SATA disks identified as SCSI? Short answer: You’re using a 3rd party driver to control the SATA adapter, which reports itself as a “SCSI” controller. Long answer: ATA miniports in Windows (until Vista) had no capability to support more than one outstanding request at a time.  This is because ATA devices were originally able to handle only a single request at a time.  Although native command queuing (NCQ...

Brendan Grant has posted code that extends the MSDN sample for interacting with WHS Notifications to provide alerting functionality in an external application when WHS health status changes. Unfortunately there is no quick and easy GetHealthState() method within the Windows Home Server SDK, instead the value is determined by going through each outstanding Notification and determining if any exist that are marked as a Warning or Error... and if so we consider the overall state to be same as the most severe, non-suppressed notification. Over on MSDN there exists a bit of sample...