MSDN Partner Benefits for Visual Studio 2010

[Update - link to the VS2010 and MSDN licensing white paper]

The company I work for is a Microsoft Gold Partner with and MSDN subscription, and this includes licenses for the new Visual Studio 2010 released yesterday. As I’ve been singled out to administer Microsoft licenses I dived into the Microsoft Partner site to figure out what licenses we are entitled to use regarding Visual Studio 2010.

I want to copy those files! – A tale on how to get files from a “locked down” virtual machine over RDP

I recently attended a course where we first connected to a virtual machine thru a custom application, then connected to the VM via RDP.

The VM had a folder full of lab exercises which would be nice to have locally for reference. But how could I move these files? The VM’s were not on internet so file transfer to a repository on the internet was out of the questions.

Mapping up local drives were also blocked, which it should for security reasons. The only available mechanism which carried data back and forth from my local machine to the VM was the clipboard.

An idea is born!

Since this was a developers course and we had Visual Studio available it was actually a no brainer.

1. Zip up the labs folder in explorer
2. Run the following code:

   static void Main(string[] args)
   {
     string base64 = Convert.ToBase64String(File.ReadAllBytes(@"C:\Student\Labs.zip"));
     File.WriteAllText(@"C:\Student\labs.txt", base64);
   }

3. Open up the base64 encoded file in visual studio
4. Copy the content to the clipboard
5. Paste the clipboard to a text file locally
6. Run the following code to decode it all:
   

   static void Main(string[] args)
   {
     string base64 = File.ReadAllText(@"c:\temp\labs.txt");
     File.WriteAllBytes( @"c:\temp\labz.zip", Convert.FromBase64String(base64) );
   }

Presto, and the lab files were transferred.

A better world with jQuery

I know I’m far behind the rest of the world, but that’s because I usually code on the web server and not on the web client. But yesterday I experienced the beauty of  jQuery first hand :)

I was first exposed to jQuery unknowingly some months ago when I lent some “free” consulting time to a web project. Since I happen to have done my share of java scripting over the years I got the task of breaking up the static design to dynamic pages, meaning constructing the script calls depending on the data. I didn’t really have a deep understanding of the $(‘#id’) syntax but I grasped the idea and made it work.

Since then I’ve read some articles about jQuery and yesterday I got another task on the web project. The task was to check if a flash had loaded, and if not, show some html instead. With a bit more knowledge of what I was looking at and figuring out that the flash was loaded with a jQuery plugin it was a breeze to implement.

$(document).ready(function() {
        if( sIFR.isActive == false )
        {
            $('#non_flash_content').show();
        }
    });

Days like this makes it worth while living, and the fact that jQuery will be natively supported in Visual Studio is great news!