Tag: Windows

“Microsoft Windows is a group of OSs manufactured by Microsoft. Windows is available in 32 and 64-bit versions and offers a graphical user interface (GUI), multitasking functionalities, virtual memory management capabilities, and support for several peripheral devices. Windows OSs constitute client as well as server versions.” (Definition from https://www.techopedia.com/definition/3390/microsoft-windows)

“Windows? I thought this was a reputable cloud developer stuff blog!”

Okay, maybe so – but Microsoft Windows is still a big part of my daily life, and to keep on developing other stuff, I sometimes need to tweak something on my PC – and hence I encounter the solutions I post here.

All this means, that all the problems, solutions and hacks related strictly to Microsoft Windows operating system go here.

PowerShell not loading them DLLs

How to resolve issues when loading DLLs in PowerShell?

This post describes a few different things that can (and will) go wrong when you’re trying to load DLLs in PowerShell, and a couple of ways you can try to fix them. Typically, you’d run into an error message like “Exception calling LoadFrom with 1 argument(s): Could not load file or assembly…. “ These issues most typically arise when you’re running a PowerShell script that depends on certain DLLs to be loaded (to then execute some of the methods from them). This could happen kind…Continue reading How to resolve issues when loading DLLs in PowerShell?

Not sure if a bug or a feature

How to remove Foxit Drive in Foxit Reader?

If you’re like me, you’re not using Adobe Reader, but rather switched to Foxit Reader years ago, and never looked back. Foxit has a great PDF printer, it’s sleek and for the most part a pleasure to use – in other words, it’s a great reader. But it’s not perfect. See, the default save location is “Foxit Drive”, and it pops up any time you try to save your document, and at least for me interrupts my workflow. This post describes how to get rid…Continue reading How to remove Foxit Drive in Foxit Reader?

Unorthodox configuration: How to use VLK and Click-to-run Office Apps side-by-side (Visio and Office 2016 as an example)

Ever had issues with different versions of Office programs not living in harmony together? Me too! This post describes how I was able to fix the issue and get Visio and Office 2016 of different installation types to play well together. Preface This blog post was inspired by my need to have Office 365 ProPlus (2016 versions) and Visio running side-by-side on my laptop. That turned out to be a lot more complicated than it arguably should be, so I documented the steps for further…Continue reading Unorthodox configuration: How to use VLK and Click-to-run Office Apps side-by-side (Visio and Office 2016 as an example)

Preventing Outlook (and other programs) from stealing focus

This post describes how to stop Windows applications from stealing focus from each other. In a practical sense, no piece of software should be able to “jump” to the top and activate your cursor in it, after the steps in this blog post have been applied. Description After some recent batch of Windows updates my Outlook desktop client started stealing focus whenever there was a new email coming in. Like most people, I get a lot of email, and after a while my humor completely…Continue reading Preventing Outlook (and other programs) from stealing focus

System.InvalidOperationException'

Using Dispatcher to update values in GUI elements from a background thread

If you’re developing something like a WPF app and you’ll need to update values on the User Interface based on a long-running operation that runs in a background thread (like depicted in my other blog post right here – that post is for a full-trust SharePoint solution, but the basic principle is the same!), you’ll probably need to use Dispatcher, or otherwise you’ll run into issues with the GUI elements being owned by another thread, and therefore forbidding access to them. This can result in an…Continue reading Using Dispatcher to update values in GUI elements from a background thread

Visual Studio's Attach to Process -dialog

Attaching the Visual Studio debugger to the right IIS worker process

Every now and then comes the time when you’d actually need to debug something, and then you’ll likely be using your Visual Studio to attach the debugger to one or more processes. Using CKSDev to attach to all IIS worker processes (w3wp.exe), or if you don’t use CKSDev, just pressing ctrl+p and selecting the processes from the list, is often a good enough solution. However, sometimes that makes your dev box sluggish, or maybe catches exceptions from code you’re not wishing to debug at the…Continue reading Attaching the Visual Studio debugger to the right IIS worker process

Troubleshooting guide for Windows hosts -file

This post describes how to fix possible issues with Windows hosts-file. I’ll first document how to find the damn file, and then go through a bunch of options on what to check and how to fix different possible issues. Opening the hosts -file First of all, hosts file location is usually: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts (link may or may not work depending on your security settings and browser version, but you can always copy-paste it to your text editor’s “Open”-dialog… :) Editing the file requires elevated privileges for…Continue reading Troubleshooting guide for Windows hosts -file