I recently bought the above wireless router on way back home from Brisbane. It was part of a starter kit with a USB wireless adapter. Perfect for me to setup shared internet between the home PC and my laptop. My internet access is through a Kidanet 128K package. This is a PPPoE type setup with an Alvarion Breeze Max Pro modem connected to some sort of wireless antennae on the roof. The antennae has a direct line of site to the Kidanet transmitter.

The internet connection is good, except for it's frequent drops which forces me to reconnect. This is ok if modem is directly hooked to my PC or the laptop which is set to reconnect automatically and does so successfully. I have enabled the auto-reconnect option on the router as well.

It appears that the auto-reconnect feature may not be working on the router. Every so often the router just seems to stop working. This I guess is because the Kidanet internet connection drops and the router is unable to reconnect. I am still connected to the router either wirelessly or even a direct wired connection to one of the ports, however pinging the router just doesn't work. All the relevant lights (such as the internet, modem, wireless or the connected port) on the router remain lit, indicating that everything is normal. Everything is anything but normal. The only way out is restarting the modem.

Today I had some Kidanet support guys check the antennae  and the modem. The did some retuning and reconfiguring, and assured me that the internet connection wouldn't drop. I have yet to verify that, but I am guessing they're wrong. The problem with the router remains.

I don't know how the other routers work with Kidanet, but I hope they do without any of the problems I am facing. I reckon this Belkin wireless router is a piece of crap.

I hate wires, so I thought this kit would be the start of my very own wireless revolution at home. Instead it has all but proven the reliability of the wires.

Working on one of our windows forms projects recently, I needed to encrypt the database connection strings in the App.config file. With a few minutes of googling, I found exactly what I was looking for here on MSDN (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/89211k9b(VS.80).aspx).

The code that did the trick for me is as below:

static void ToggleConfigEncryption(string exeConfigName)
{
// Takes the executable file name without the
// .config extension.
try
{
// Open the configuration file and retrieve 
// the connectionStrings section.
Configuration config = ConfigurationManager.
OpenExeConfiguration(exeConfigName);
ConnectionStringsSection section =
config.GetSection("connectionStrings")
as ConnectionStringsSection;
if (section.SectionInformation.IsProtected)
{
// Remove encryption.
section.SectionInformation.UnprotectSection();
}
else
{
// Encrypt the section.
section.SectionInformation.ProtectSection(
"DataProtectionConfigurationProvider");
}
// Save the current configuration.
config.Save();
Console.WriteLine("Protected={0}",
section.SectionInformation.IsProtected);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
}
}

I placed the code above in a console application and which requires just one parameter i.e. the application executable file name.

My console application, Encryptor, is available for download from here. To use it:

1. Place Encryptor in the same directory as your application executable and the config file.
2. Run Encryptor from the command line as:

                Encryptor <ApplicationExeFileName.exe>

As shown in the code above, Encryptor is a toggle application. That means, if you run it once, it will encrypt the connectionString and run it the second time and it will decrypt it.

That's it! Enjoy.

PS: If you want my Encryptor VS2005 Project, just put up a comment and I shall make arrangements ;-) 

If you use Team Foundation Server and Team System for development, you would have come across, Build Ticker, the handy tool which keeps you updated on all team builds. This is a great tool for TFS administrators.

There are a couple of snags though. First, because it runs in the background, it does consume a fair bit of memory, especially if you're trying to squeeze every bit of memory for whatever else you're doing.

Second; it will prevent you from shutting your system down. I kept getting the following warning logged in the event logs.

Source: USER32
EventID: 1073
Description: The attempt to reboot <yourComputerName> failed 

 I figured out after discovering that when the Build Ticker loads at system bootup, the options window for it load as well. It doesn't appear on the desktop unless you select it by the Alt-Tab method.

So now, before shutting down, I right click on the Build Ticker icon in the tray and click exit. System will happily power down after that. 

I recently upgraded to Office 2007 and generally my experience in terms of performance was negative. It runs absolutely slow! The worst culprit of the lot was Outlook 2007.

Googling the issue thankfully worked and I located this brilliant site by Roundtrip Solutions with enough tips to resolve the problem. The tips listed are a long read and for me all I had to do was:

Shane Keller has offered the following general solution on the Microsoft Outlook Discussion forum, which has been refined through feedback by other users as they implement it:

STEP 1: Turn off Outlook 2007 and locate each of these files in turn and rename as indicated. For some reason, during the upgrade these four files can become corrupted - the migration from 2003 to 2007 isn’t the smoothest but not having to create all your POP3 accounts again is excellent.

1. extend.dat - you will find this file in the location | Drive Letter:\Documents and Settings\user-directory\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\extend.dat

//change it to extend.old

Long live Shane Keller!