srochford

What do you want to do with it? If you're using it for MFL then I think it's good (the staff at my last place chose it and liked it) but if you're not using it for that then I'd guess it's not so good :-)

No problem :-) After the mess that's created by Frontpage or Word (or Powerpoint!) it was something of a surprise to find the MS do understand how standards work and can implement them! Visual Studio 2008 also pretty much forces compliance.

That is a key use (and that's what the name suggests) but it is more than that - it allows you to set up a share name which doesn't depend on a server (so instead of \\server\share you have \\domain\share) If you move (say) home folders you don't have to touch user properties, you just update DFS to point to the new server and magic happens :-) setacl or subinacl are command line tools which will let you reset ownership (probably easier than using the GUI if you've got many folders to fix) Just as an aside, if you're using Windows server quotas then you do need to fix the ownership; that's what's used to determine how much space a user has used (and as a further aside - note that you can't change ownership if it will take the user over their quota; turn off quota management, change owner, turn back on quotas)

Won't disagree with the suggestions for editors and your criticism of Frontpage is fair but Expression is a whole different animal. It's pretty much impossible to generate invalid code in Expression - you tell it what version of HTML you want and it will flag as invalid anything which doesn't match up.

Java? Flash?

Well, if you want it to work on anything other than IE you really want to avoid ActiveX and if you want to support platforms other than Windows then you definitely don't want ActiveX. Not really sure about the first point - are you saying that you want search engines to be able to read something you present as a web site or that you want your app to be able to query search engines (some kind of meta-search engine?) If the former then it's just about getting good HTML with good content; the latter means you need to check on the APIs for reading the search engines On the subject of advertising, I can understand that you don't necessarily want Google to take money from you but are you just re-inventing the wheel for the sake of it? I'd recommend BrightCode Although they mainly focus on programming for web sites they do have some very competent programmers. You'll see a range of testimonials on their web site and they can also put you in touch with clients if you want more detail.

Trouble is, he's wrong - I reckon it's a sprocket that you need. I can give you that advice for free, but if you want to know which sprocket then that will cost money (but I'm afraid I can't tell you how much here and, frankly, if you need to ask then you probably can't afford it :-))

Mono does ASP.Net, not classic ASP; the Apache ASP is weird - it's Perl, not Visual Basic or VBScript so I'm not really sure why they called it ASP! (It looks good if you know Perl, run Apache and don't want to use PHP but it's not what I recognise as ASP!) I found this website which appears to be selling version 3.6 for $30 - don't know if that would be any use.

You can find the mailboxes which are left over in a couple of ways - I posted this about a year ago some links for info on how you can do this. The problem with finding mailboxes is that Exchange System Manager only shows you mailboxes which have been used; Active Directory shows all users who are mailbox enabled even if they've never been used and this is what the Exchange setup is checking. If you don't have too many users then find all of them, select them, right click and use Exchange Tasks to remove all Exchange attributes

The Microsoft Installer Clean Up Utility is quite good for removing left over bits of installs; it's worth a try. The other thing is to try re-installing it and then un-installing it; that might get rid of left over bits If that fails, I'd start running sysinternals procmon to have a look at what the upgrade advisor is finding (basically, you should see that it finds something that shouldn't be there but it's likely to not be easy!)

Excellent! Somehow the IUPAC names like 1,4 doctor benzene just wouldn't work :-)

It's a bit more than just a compiler but if that's all you need then you can certainly save yourself a shed load of disc space!

Yes, but if you have multiple policies linked at the same level (eg 2 linked at the top of the domain; 2 linked to the same OU) then they apply in reverse numerical order (which is *really* stupid!) The best thing to do is run the RSoP as pointed out by @browolf - then you can be sure what's going to happen.

They've been doing it for a while; this thread is the 5th on Edugeek in the past year to refer to it. If you don't already get them then sign up to the MS newsletters - there are a variety available - and you'll get notified when new programmes start or packages like this are made available.

It certainly does make sense to record which machines go where (stick it as a field in Active Directory or add the computer name as a column to the spreadsheet) but I don't think that the police are likely to go looking for equipment with particular serial numbers. As I understand it, what happens is that they recover (say) an HP 2530 laptop with serial number 12345; if you can say "Yes, I bought serial number 12345 on date ...." then that proves it belongs to you.

Not quite sure what you're trying to do but something like this might help: Set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") Set ofso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") sFolder=oFSO.GetParentFolderName(Wscript.ScriptFullName) ofso.copyfolder sFolder,"c:\temp\test",true 'do something ofso.deletefolder "c:\temp\test",true First three lines work out "where am I now"; next line copies everything that's in the same folder as the script to a folder called "test" under c:\temp - change that to whatever you want. I'm guessing you then want to run some kind of setup process from that folder so do that at the "do something" bit and the final line deletes the folder just copied. The two "true" flags will overwrite anything that was already in c:\temp\test and the second one deletes files which are read-only

select * from jobs where datepart(m,logdate)=12 gets you december only select * from jobs where datepart(m,logdate)=12 or datepart(m,logdate)=1 gets you January and December. Getting "not January and not December" is just a case of negating that - select * from jobs where not(datepart(m,logdate)=12) and not(datepart(m,logdate)=1) although because we "know" something about months you can simplify it to: select * from jobs where datepart(m,logdate) between 2 and 12

Well, yes, but a username must be unique because it's the thing that identifies the user to the network. Given that pretty much everyone here will be using some kind of database to hold details of their users then it makes sense to just borrow the unique key from that system. As @tamarside says, there are so many occasions when you want to link the data in AD (or whatever directory you use) back to the student data that leaving out that key field just makes extra (and unnecessary work) for you later. I do understand that some people don't like to be referred to as numbers but sometimes I think that technical benefits outweigh "niceness"

You don't really need any special software to generate bar codes - just something that can print out numbers which you then do in a bar code font. I think the commonest font is called Code 39 and if you google you'll find several free versions of this. the only thing to watch for is that the code needs to have a start and end character - there's lots more info at this web site. If you can put the label out of sight so it won't get ripped off then you can just use cheap paper labels; that will save a lot of money!

Server 2003 introduced something called Access Based Enumeration. that makes it really easy to have (eg) d:\home\user1, d:\home\user2 etc with d:\home shared as home. You then set the home folder to be \\server\home\user1, \\server\home\user2 and so on. Provided that the permissions are set so that users only have access to their own folder (ie no rights on the folder d:\home, only on d:\home\user1 etc) then even if they try and map to \\server\home they only see their own folder. Doing it like this makes life *much* easier - you just have one top level share. It also means that admins can access \\server\home and then browse into any folder they need. It used to cause problems to have too many shares on a server; I don't think it does any longer (although it might slightly slow down server startup; each share is effectively re-created at startup) Even if you don't turn on ABE users can't do any harm with trying to browse to \\server\home\ provided you have the permissions right.

If it's a Windows 2003 network then this is no longer necessary; lastlogontimestamp is replicated across all DCs

If it's Windows and you're looking at future proofing the Powershell is the way to go. In your end of year type example, one of the things you'll want to do is clear out old mailboxes. From Exchange 2007 on, this is really easy with Powershell but not so easy with other languages.

I could probably write something.

I love it when people go out of their way to make life difficult :-) Have you got a list of the users that you're working on? If so, a quick fix is to load that into Excel - you'll get a list in Column A (eg) In column B you put something like: ="robocopy \\fileserver1\h-" & A1 & " \\nasbox\backup\" & A1 & " /move /s /r:1 /w:1 /b" and in column C put: ="net share h-" &A1 & " /d" Fill down columns B and C and you'll get 2 long sets of commands. copy and paste each column into notepad and save as a batch file. run the 2 batch files (probably quickest to do the first on the server; the second must be run on the server) and they will move all the files and then delete the shares. You also need to delete the empty folders - assuming the shared folders are all on the same drive that's easy (another Excel column). If they're not then it's a bit more work! If you were using a script to find the accounts to expire then you could just add something to that to do the move - if you've got a line which gets the username then something like this: set oShell=createobject("wscript.shell") sCmd="robocopy \\fileserver1\h-" & sUser & " \\nasbox\backup\" & sUser & " /move /s /r:1 /w:1 /b" oShell.run sCmd,,true

Visual Studio 2008 Professional is free to most students - check out Microsoft Dreamspark for a whole raft of stuff Another way of getting VS (and just about every other bit of MS software!) is the MSDN Academic Alliance. this does cost money but it's not much - details on the MS web site.