How to run .bat files from Visual Studio

Here's a pretty nifty way to run .bat files directly from Visual Studio.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5605885/how-to-run-a-bat-from-inside-the-ide

I can now run .bat files without leaving Visual Studio just by right-clicking the .bat file and select 'Run bat file'. 

MySQL Workbench export problem - "mysqldump.exe is version 5.5.16" will not work with version 5.6.10 of MySQL Server"

Got this error today when trying to export a database hosted on MySQL Server 5.6.10 using MySQL Workbench 5.2.47.

Opening up a command-prompt and comparing the mysqldump.exe versions between MySQL Server and MySQL Workbench showed following

Solution
Copied the mysqldump.exe (version 5.6.10) from the MySQL Server 5.6 installation folder and replaced the mysqldump.exe (version 5.5.16) at the MySQL Workbench 5.2 CE folder.

Export now works like a charm again.

Changing MySQL root password

1. Launch a command-prompt. 
2. Navigate to the bin folder of your MySQL installation.
   (e.g. C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.6\bin)
3. Start the MySQL command-line interface via
   mysql -u root -p 
4. You will be prompted to type your existing root password.
5. After a successful login you should see a prompt saying 'mysql>'. 
6. Enter following command to change password
   SET PASSWORD FOR root@localhost=PASSWORD('new_passw_goes_here');
7. Volia!

AWS, ColudWatch and monitoring of available diskspace

We have experienced some disk space related hick-ups in our AWS production environment over the last 3 months.

Some of them were caused by IIS logging (enabled by default when setting up a new website) and others originated from custom trace-logging being left turned on by mistake.

To prevent this from ever happening again we wanted to setup an automatic monitoring and notification mechanism that sent us an email if  the available disk space should drop below a certain threshold on any of the app- or db-servers.

Easy enough...just setup 2 alarms in the AWS CloudWatch and have another cup of coffee I thought.
Doh!
CloudWatch does not have any metrics on the available disk space...

....but they have an API that allows us to create custom metrics and push data into CloudWatch.

Before firing up Visual Studio I decided to skim Google Bing for what's already out there (we don't want to re-invent the wheel...or rather the guys/customer paying our bills don't...). I can hardly be the first one facing this problem right?

Right!
Here's a great open source project that perfectly fit our needs:
https://github.com/eleven41/CloudWatchMonitor
(or if you prefer the binaries: http://www.eleven41.com/Labs/cloudwatch-monitor-for-windows)

The monitor app runs either as a command-line program (nifty to start with to make sure you get the .config settings right) or as a Windows service.

Kudos to Eleven41 for a great solution (and for opensourcing the code) !

What time and timezone does a MySQL instance use?

select CURRENT_TIMESTAMP();
select @@global.time_zone;

Complete uninstall/removal of MySQL

Simply uninstalling MySQL using the Windows standard Programs and Features->Uninstall is not enough if you want to completely remove MySQL from the machine.

Here are the steps required:

• Uninstall MySQL using the standard Windows program uninstaller
• Delete C:\Program Files\MySQL
• Delete C:\Program Files (x86)\MySQL
• Delete C:\ProgramData\MySQL
• Delete from any Users' AppData folders. Example: C:\Users\rdoverby\AppData\Roaming\MySQL
• Reinstall MySQL

Dev tools 2013

Mr. Hanselman has one...so should you.
Here's mine anno 2013.

*) Oh...I'm still on Win 7 by the way...

General tools

• Windows 8 Pro (64-bit)
• Office 2013
• Visio 2013
• Firefox
• Chrome
• DropBox
• Jing
• Skype 
• NotePad++
• Paint.NET 
• FreeMind
• Avast!
• OpenVPN
• Winsplit Revolution
• DEAMON Tools Lite
• CDBurnerXP
• Fences
• uTorrent
• VLC media player
• 
  

Dev tools

• Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate
• Visual Studio 2012 Plugin: Configuration Transform
  (web.config transformation support for app.config's as well)
• Snippet Designer
• ReSharper
• ILSpy
• Fiddler
• WireframeSketcher
• Git for Windows 
• MySQL
• HeidiSQL
• Royal TS
• FileZilla
• TextDiff
• WinMerge
• VirtualBox
• HttpWatch
• IcoFX

Firefox plugins/add-ons

• ColorZilla (color management incl. picker)
• Firebug
• Firefinder for Firebug (css and xpath expression evaluation)
• FireQuery (for jQuery development)
• Google PageSpeed (performance optimization)
• Xmarks (bookmark sync)