• Rick Strahl has a good blog article on adding default Assemblies, Namespaces, and Control Prefixes in your web.config file so that they apply globally.  I believe it makes working with Custom Controls in ASP.Net much easier.

  • I installed some Microsot Updates and my Speaker and Network icons disapeared in my notifcation tray after rebooting.  When I went to the properties for the tray (Taskbar->Right Mouse Click->Properties), in the Notifcation Area tab, in the System Icons panel, the Volume and Network checkboxes where greyed out.  The fix is to go to Task Manager, kill the explorer.exe process, and then restart the explorer process.  To restart, from the Task Manager, File->New Task and enter explorer.exe in the dialog box.  Here is the link where I found this information.

  • Another SQL 2008 feature:  I was trying to connect to the SQL 2008 instance using SQL Server Authentication without success.  The reason?  The Server Authentication mode settings were set to Window Authentication mode only.  I modified the setting to SQL Server and Windows Authentication mode.  To get to this setting, right mouse click on the server instance, select properties, then select the Security Page. Here is link that decribes the process.  After making the change, restart SQL Service (2008).

  • Here is a link to a macro for quickly selecting a complete XAML tag in the Visual Studio designer.  Cut and paste the SelectXAMLTagContent macro using the Visual Studio Macro Editor (Tools->Macros->Edit Macro [you frist have to select a macro from the Macro Explorer in order to activate the Edit Macro menu item]).  I created a new module called WPF under MyMacros and pasted the subroutine into the WPF module.

    Then, to bind the macro to a key combination in Visual Studio 2008, go to Tools->Options->Environment->Keyboard.  Next, enter "macro" in the Show commands containing: dialog box, select the XAML macro (in my case, it was Macros.MyMacros.WPF.SelectXAMLTagContent), and assign your key combination.  I used Cntrl+Shift+Q.

    Here is a link to a How Do I Create and Edit Macros video.