• I was having a problem with my HP Photosmart C7250 printer going offline and staying offline, even though the printer was powered on and the network connection was good.  Here is a link to a utility program from HP (HP Print and Scan Doctor) that fixed the problem.

  • Here is a link to a Visual Studio tool that will recursively collapse selected nodes in the Solution Explorer window.  This tool is handy when you have a Visual Studio solution with a lot of projects and folders.

  • Here is a link to a Visual Studio magazine article about a new Visual Studio 2013 add-in that allows you to search for code snippets from the cloud and then insert them into your code without leaving Visual Studio.  To download the add-in, follow this link.

  • I was working at a site that had a Microsoft SQL 2008 database that was local to the desktop, and was consuming a lot of disk space due to the size of the log file (.ldf) for the database.  Here are three steps to shrink the log file.

1) From within SQL Server Management Studio, right mouse click on the database and select Properties.  In the Database Properties dialog box pick Options.  In the Options dialog box change the recovery model for the database from Full to Simple, and click OK.

2) From within SQL Server Management Studio, right mouse click on the database, and select Tasks -> Shrink -> Files. In the Shrink File dialog box, set the File Type to Log, and click OK.

3) If you want, change the recovery model back to Full from Simple in the Database Properties -> Options dialog box.