Im really not much of a fan of Outlook 2007: Its slow and buggy. It keeps loosing my search folders, that i use for handling of categorized emails - and I have given op the use of flags, as they keep disappearing. Its horrendously slow - and it often freezes while attempting to open the most interesting of my mails.

I have learned to live with this in anticipation of a service pack, that will adresse these problems, as I fell in love with the search. But now for weeks I haven't been able to find mails, that I know I have in my folders with search phrases that should return these mails.

When searching I get the message "Search results may be incomplete because items are stil being indexed. Click here for more details". When clicking I am told that Outlook is currently indexing my mails, and some number of remaining items across all open mailboxes.

This number has now been the same for weeks. No indexing is happening. It seems Outlook gets stuck indexing. So to resolve this is, this is what I did:

1. I opened Indexing Options from Control Panel
2. Clicked Modify
3. Unselected everything
4. Closed the dialog, and clicked Advanced
5. Rebuild, with the result "0 items indexed" and closed this dialog
6. Clicked Modify again, and added the previously unselected items.
7. Closed Modify, clicked Advanced and Rebuild.

Now I have indexed all my mail, and search is now back to normal.

I am the responsible developer for the danish entrepreneur site and community www.amino.dk where I work full time with developing new features and improving the existing platform.

For years we have been running an antiquated debate forum on the IdealBB software, the old classic asp solution. It was buggy, featureless and really didn't fit in between all of our own .Net 2.0 solutions.

So we decided to shift to the very promising Community Server and we have been planning this change of platform for some time now.

Yesterday was the day we moved almost 150.000 posts, and more than 11.000 user profiles, and it went pretty well. It was a tough day, we faced a lot of unexpected problems, and there are still a heap of bugs to take care of, but we pretty much pulled it of without loosing anything important.

In the following days the new site will be crawled and all pages and threads will be paired up with the old URLS and 301 redirected, so that search engines will not get confused.

This was a bit of a personal note, and I will now return to the debugging the new community.

If you want you code posted on the blog formatted nicely and even highlighted, get the formatter plugin for Windows Live Writer by Steve Dunn.

You just put the files in the Plugin folder, and it magically appears in your "Insert" menu.

There seems to be som issues with RSS feeds though, so beware.

It currently supports:

• BatchFile
• C#
• CSS
• HTML
• INIFile
• Java
• JScript
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• SQL
• VB.Net
• VBScript
• XML

See my post about SQL as an example.

Every so often I come across the task to create a local copy of a database for testing purposes or to host for an external consultant or freelancer.

Every time I seem to forget how to do this the easiest possible way, so this time im blogging it both to share, and to save it for next time. If you know how to do even easier og better, please let me know, and i will update the script:

USE master 
GO 

-- Create a database backup of the database
-- that you want a copy of, and insert the
-- path as the BackupFileName below
DECLARE @BackupFileName NVARCHAR(2000) 
SET @BackupFileName = 'D:\Backup\backups\AminoUser\newbackup.bak' 

-- Find the logical name for both the Data and Log file
-- (right click database, properties, Files)
-- And enter names in the below
DECLARE @DataFileName NVARCHAR(200) 
SET @DataFileName = 'AminoUser'
DECLARE @LogFileName NVARCHAR(200) 
SET @LogFileName = 'AminoUser_log' 

-- What do you want the new database to be called?
DECLARE @NewDatabaseName NVARCHAR(200) 
SET @NewDataBaseName = 'AminoUser_Test2' 

-- Where to put the new files? Set the directory ending with \
DECLARE @NewFilePath NVARCHAR(2000)
SET @NewFilePath = 'D:\SQLdata\' 

-- And now execute.
DECLARE @Query VARCHAR(2000)
SET @Query = 'RESTORE FILELISTONLY FROM DISK = ' 
   +  QUOTENAME(@BackupFileName, '''') + 
' RESTORE DATABASE ' + @NewDatabaseName + 
' FROM DISK = ' + QUOTENAME(@BackupFileName, '''') +
   ' WITH RECOVERY, 
   MOVE ' + QUOTENAME(@DataFileName, '''') + ' TO ' 
              + QUOTENAME(@NewFilePath+ @NewDataBaseName+ '.mdf', '''') + ', 
   MOVE ' + QUOTENAME(@LogFileName, '''') + ' TO ' 
              + QUOTENAME(@NewFilePath+ @NewDataBaseName+ '.ldf', '''') 
EXEC (@Query)
GO

A few months ago i got a second monitor for my developer rig, and that has really increased my productivity.

Any developer who has gone from one to two monitors, will tell you that they can never go back.

In a fit of irritation a few days ago, i finally got around to ordering the third monitor, that I have been contemplation for a while. I got the 24" BenQ FP241W 1920x1200 TFT Wide, and it is as nice as the reviews will tell you:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/displays/review/2006/09/13/BenQ-FP241W-24in-Widescreen-Monitor/p1

Eagerly i started my day with unpacking the beast, and rearranging my desk fitting the new larger screen in between my laptop on the left and my old second screen on my right.

But obviously I forgot my thinking hat, while ordering the third screen, as although I have 2 outputs on my IBM Advanced Dock, one DVI and one VGA, the graphics card really only has one output; therefore i had to live all of yesterday still with only two screens, although a much larger primary screen.

But now i ran into the problem, that I needed a second graphics card to put in the docking station, but Vista being Vista, only allows one driver running. If you attempt to load another driver, it will disable one of them. So i basically needed a graphics card, that would fit in my dock (only half-size PCIe cards fit) and that would run on the same driver as the ATI FireGL 5250 card in my Laptop.

The closest i could get to a solution would be the FireMV 2200, that fits in my dock, and it was in the FireXX family. It did however seem to run on a different driver. I decided to order it, and se if it would work out.

Today the mail arrived with the package, and i mounted the new card. Now what happened was, the FireMV driver was installed and the driver was then again disabled by Vista. All screens went black for a while, and all three monitors came back with an image ... yeah !!

Most likely Vista is defaulting to the standard VGA driver, which isn't exactly what i was hoping, but while im looking into that, I actually have all three monitors running with Aero and everything.

While browsing i came across a clever little app called Ultramon. It gives you a taskbar with the actual windows on each screen, without the start button. This is great stuff.