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Techemistry Blog

Daily Tip - Update AddRemoveProgramsIcon (and other properties) in a Visual Studio Installer Project

6/11/2019 8:35:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

So this one drove me nuts. It seems soooo simple. I have a Visual Studio 2017 solution with a Window Service Project and a Installer Project. For the life of me, I could not figure out where to update the specific properties that would allow the installer to: Name the application correctly (if a friendly name) Specify other text values like Author, Description, Manufacturer, Title, ProductName, etc. ...

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ZeroSSL with IIS 10

5/3/2019 5:11:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

I have an IIS 10 server behind a VPN/Firewall, and was bound and determined to use Let's Encrypt even though the server can't be reached by Let's Encrypt to authorize the SSL certificate request. I ran across www.zerossl.com, but was very confused has how to successfully complete the process. Here's my suggestions that allowed me to get it working: In IIS, create a Certificate Request (CR). Copy the contents of the CR to the clipboard. ...

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MinerGate.com Review - Mixed Emotions

2/3/2018 6:44:00 AM -- Ted Krapf

During the 2017 Q3 Crypto-boom, I finally decided to look into cryptomining. I understood it at a very high level, but had never gone past understanding it conceptually. As with any good project, I first started with research. I wanted to know things such as: Is it worth it? What kind of hardware do I ideally need? What hardware can I get away with to get my feet wet? What coins can be mined, which cannot? What is a...

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Account Breach Monitoring

9/20/2017 3:36:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

As a software developer that has to deal with user accounts, one of the topics always in my mind is security. Is the box/vm/host secured? Did we implement strong enough password/login rules? What ciphers are enabled? Have the rules changed? Are the users doing something crazy that could compromise the security of the system? As with social engineering, the weakest link in a well designed security model is usually the users. So, what happens if one of the users (maybe...

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DBML Visualizer VERY Slow - solved!

3/29/2017 8:15:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

Greetings fellow coders! I've had this super annoying recurring issue with Visual Studio (2010, 2013, not sure about 2017 yet as I haven't started using it on a daily basis yet), the DBML visualizer, and Windows 10 --- the DBML visualizer is just dog slow and frustrating to work with. After some snooping around and looking through task manager, I realized that tabtip.exe was interfering with Visual Studio's DBML editor. T...

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Poor Man's SQL Log Shipping (Kinda)

12/23/2016 9:54:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

Hi all, A Very Happy Holidays to everyone out there! It's been a very exciting and busy year helping clients with unique needs and solutions. I'm looking forward to what 2017 will bring! I recently was tasked by a client to come up with a simple (as elegant as possible), and inexpensive Log Shipping solution for Microsoft SQL Server Express. Yes, I know SQL Server Express doesn't have Log Shipping, and the solution would just be to purchase a ...

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Excel Column Letter To Number.com

4/8/2016 3:06:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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Easy & Powerful Ecommerce Solution

4/5/2016 7:58:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

Looking for a simple, beautiful, yet powerful e-commerce solution for your business? Check out www.Shopify.com Shopify has beautiful themes, an amazingly simple and clean user interface, a really slick Apps add-on store to extend the functionality of your site and much more. Let me know your experiences with Shopify!...

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asp:Menu Flicker on Page_Load - Solved

7/13/2015 1:48:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

Have an asp:menu that is flickering on (showing all the sub menus) on page_load and/or post back? Of course you do, because that server control is pretty squirrely. Here's the simple CSS fix that corrects the issue: /* fixes ugly menu flicker */ .menu ul li ul { display: none; } .menu ul li { position: relative; float: left; list-style: none; } .menu ul li ul li { width: 100%; }

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Offline ClickOnce app with command line parameters

3/9/2015 9:46:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

So the need for a client's offline ClickOnce app to have command line parameters came up again. (oh boy). The Microsoft docs initially spec'd out that you can't do this when the ClickOnce app is an "offline" app. But since .NET 3.1, there is a trick you can use to make offline ClickOnce command line parameters function. The scenario is this: Client has a ClickOnce app that gets updated (redeployed) by their developer frequen...

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Windows Server 2008 Install DLL into GAC

1/23/2015 8:48:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

So first I want to say this has driven me crazy for days on end (an hour here, an hour there. If you're here, you already have discovered that you can no longer (simply) drag and drop dll files into C:\windows\assembly and have them installed auto-magically into the windows Global Assembly Cache. Also sadly, you may have discovered that you can't deploy dll files into the GAC from a ClickOnce application (understandably why, but still annoying). There are ...

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IIS7 FTP 530 Home Directory Inaccessible SOLVED!

12/1/2014 10:53:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

So this post is definitely going to fall into the "rants" category of my blogging. I can't tell you the number of times that I've attempted to setup Microsoft's IIS FTP services. IIS6, IIS7, IIS7.5. Now, don't get me wrong, if you want a simple FTP site so you can maybe publish web content or simply have one user account, it's a quick solution without adding any software to your box. But the second you even start to think about user directory isolation - RUN....

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Project Time Tracking - The Best Solution

4/2/2014 1:50:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

So the other day I set out to look for an app, a widget, a sidebar gadget or a web app that handled Time Keeping for project work. I was surprised to find that while there are a lot of tools out there, many are lacking, cumbersome, expensive, or just simply way over complicated. So I decided that I'd just create something for myself to u...

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Transaction Express / TransFirst API & ACH Payment Integration

3/31/2014 3:20:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

This last week I had a client come to me with another interesting situation that needed a solution. My client had previously sought out a cost effective and easy to administer 3rd party solution for taking checking account payments while having the ability to set up automatic recurring billing. They found Transactio...

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Dynamic PayPal Buttons without using tags

10/16/2013 3:21:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

A client of mine recently wanted to collect payments on her website for event registration with her PayPal account. The catch was, Adults were $10 ea, Children (3-12) were $8 ea, and Children (3 & younger) were $5 ea. So I set out on an adventure to figure out how to do this. Obviously we didn't want to make a PayPal button for every possible combination of registration possible, that would be of been maddening. Instead, ideally I wanted to build a form on her site using...

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DNN Live Chat

9/6/2013 9:00:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

So the age old question... buy it or build it? Recently I was helping a client with their new ERP that my team and I developed for them. Part of the ERP is public facing and we wanted to integrate a Live Chat feature to help the client's customers transition through the changes. I was very surprised to find a real lack of quality Live Chat services out there that fell into a happy medium between Good Features and Free. So after toiling around with a few canned solutions and service...

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"We Are Already Cyborgs"

8/15/2013 1:13:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

Crazy.. "If human history is the story of a creature who molts from ape to angel - or as Nietzsche claimed, from beast to Superman - then somewhere along the way it seems that we must become machines." -Erik Davis. If you don't follow "Shots of Awe" it's some pretty thought arousing rapid fire philosophy that's kind of fun! ...

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Keywords, SEO, and Internet Ads

8/13/2013 2:42:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

Clients always have great questions about SEO, Keywords, and Internet Marketing. What are some of the basics, gotchas, and where's a person or business to get started? There is no magic bullet - sorry. Like anything, hard work and research will pay off. Below are some fast tips I recently sent to a client that I thought I'd share.... You always want to avoid what I call Keyword Stuffing. Google’s spider (called Panda) that cr...

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Placebo Buttons -- they are everywhere!

7/2/2013 8:03:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

I thought this would be interesting to share. I can't think of any computer or Internet graphical user interface (GUI) buttons that are merely placebos, but I've only been thinking about it for a second here. Can you think of any?

DNN Custom Modules - Locations, Simple Product Catalog, Form Builder and more

5/20/2013 8:35:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

As I work with clients I come across special needs that the client will require on their website. I want to remind everyone that I can custom build basically any functionality for your website. Most of my clients are using the DotNetNuke CMS platform, and I've built a nice set of custom modules to help my clients get the results they need. Here are a few of them . . . MultiForm DNN Module ...

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Mobile - Looking Good (and Easy!)

5/9/2013 7:53:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

What's all the buzz about? One of the new buzz words now for sometime has been Responsive Web Design. What does it mean? What does it mean for my business? First a little back story. Previous to the concept of Responsive Web Design, if you wanted to have a mobile version of your site you had to choose from a couple options. Native Mobile App - this meant having...

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Oh Silly Hyphen - Prevent Line Break on Hyphen

4/29/2013 7:27:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

Here's a cool thing I learned today. I had an issue where a customer's webpage contained a word that required a hyphen to be grammatically correct: pre-plated. The word pre-plated appeared at the end of a line in a set width column. Internet Explorer would render the word on two lines instead of one. This would also happen when zoom levels other than 100% were set in other browsers and/or when the responsive design would kick in. In other words, the sentence format...

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Graphics Goodness - Fluid Dynamics Rendering

4/23/2013 4:25:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

PhysXInfo seems to have solved a challenging tasks, making computer generated water look like water. Now, I'm not talking about fluid rendering with the horsepower like ILM uses for movies like The Perfect Storm, but instead using a commercial available desktop to render out the magic in real-time. Think video game, instead of pre-rendered movie special effects. Rendering water is particularly tricky because it ta...

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One-Way Trip To Mars -- You can sign up soon

4/16/2013 5:33:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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Combine Excel Documents Using C#

3/15/2013 12:47:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

A client yesterday had a common problem, "Ted I have 100+ Excel documents that I need to be able to quickly search through, and I'd like to combine all those work books into a single .xlsx file so that I can just search in one document." Sounds simple enough right? The first thing we tried together was scouring the web for a VBA script to do this. Seems simple, get a list of the files in a directory, open each doc, and copy and paste its contents into the m...

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Stupid chain letter spam

2/6/2013 3:51:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

Infrequently I love getting chain letter spam, so that I can read through it, pick it apart, and then reply to the 100+ people that I was not BCC'd with. Note the use of "infrequently". It's bad enough to get spam, but to get it directly from family members? Plus the fact that my email address is then shared with 100 other friendly spammers because even after repeated attempts to explain the BCC feature, it doesn't get used. Sigh.... I thought I'd share...

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Facebook, Amazon, and Google going the way of Rome?

1/28/2013 8:18:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

I just ran across an interesting article on Gizmodo that cited John Naughton ...

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End of the World?

12/18/2012 4:18:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

So, the Mayan's 'predicted' the end of the world? Seems strange that they would do such a thing. I guess every civilization has thought of their beginning and their demise. As advanced as the Mayans were, their mathematics didn't take leap year into account. The actual number of days in a year is 365.2425, not 365. This is because a day is not precisely 24 hours. Now, since the Mayan's didn't take this into consideration, they had a rounding error. Now after cent...

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Why Get A New Website

4/23/2012 4:13:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

When customers visit your website does it look like a time capsule? Was Bill Clinton still in office the last time you updated your site? Customers want to see new content; it's not a question of, it's a demand. Take Facebook as example, do you know why facebook.com gets over ONE BILLION hours of use daily? It's because people have, arguably, become addicted to looking -- looking at refreshing content. What's new with their friends and family? Has anyone commented on ...

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Reverse Sale: The Answer?

5/7/2012 4:13:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

How do you monetize your online presence? If you are 'in business', I would think you are probably in the business of making money. Are you running an eCommerce site? Are you advertising to your visitors? Are you selling a service, subscription, or knowledge? In the late 90's, it seemed like everyone was getting into the online game. Giant ideas came and went. Some things have changed, but undeniably some very simple, non-technological principals still apply: A grea...

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Busy Beavers & Domain Registrations

8/16/2012 3:57:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

It's been a while since my last blog entry -- life has been extraordinarily busy with IT and web development projects, some family transitions, and planning for my upcoming wedding to the girl of my dreams! Have you ever run into a client, or guilty yourself, of purchasing tons of extra domain names for a single business? Even ones that aren't related to the business name, but end up pointing to the same website? I h...

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