Monday, January 26, 2009

How to check if the Laptop IR (Infrared) is working

This is really cool - open your Cellular phone camera and point it to the laptop IR sensor. The sensor will blink every 3-4 seconds on the cellular camera screen.

I've been told it also works with remote controls (so you can check the batteries), and I can only guess it's working with any digital camera.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Windows XP drivers for laptops

As I wrote before I've got HP dv6700 which I've installed win2003 on. Few days ago I've finished the project for which I needed that OS, and I've started to install WinXP on this machine. As I found out HP doesn't really says which drivers I should use for Windows XP. I've tried installing drivers similar to the ones they say for Vista (only WinXP version of them) and they didn't realy want to install...

Anyway, I started to get somewhere only after installing SiSoftware Sandra. An amazing piece of software that just finds out exactly what kind of hardware you got. With this software I found out in minutes which drivers I should use.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

WebPart wsp does not include dependent DLLs

I was trying to develop a webpart for SharePoint 2007 & WSS3 using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Tools: Visual Studio 2005 Extensions, Version 1.1.

Everything worked just fine, until I found out that the WSP file created by the add-on does not include dependent DLLs (from other projects in the solution). I could not find any good solution, so finally I had the following options:

1. In post-build event, use ILMerge to merge all the DLLs into a single DLL with the name & key file of the webpart, and replace existing DLL with this new merged DLL.

2. Add the dependent DLL to the project files of the webpart. This way the WSP file includes the dependent DLL. An improvement: add the DLL file in the following directory: bin/Release/ (change the project file with notepad) - this way any new compilation will include the new DLL.

3. Probably the best option - use a 3rd party tool to create the WSP file - WSPBuilder for example.