Author: nrogoff

Cultures (CultureInfo and RegionInfo) Not supported on Windows Phone 7

Here is a list of cultures from the Microsoft Silverlight supported cultures listing (CultureInfo Class) that I have discovered are not currently (11/11/2010) NOT supported on the Windows Phone 7 platform.

ar-DZ

Arabic (Algeria)

ar-BH

Arabic (Bahrain)

ar-EG

Arabic (Egypt)

ar-IQ

Arabic (Iraq)

ar-JO

Arabic (Jordan)

ar-KW

Arabic (Kuwait)

ar-LB

Arabic (Lebanon)

ar-LY

Arabic (Libya)

ar-MA

Arabic (Morocco)

ar-OM

Arabic (Oman)

ar-QA

Arabic (Qatar)

ar-SA

Arabic (Saudi Arabia)

ar-SY

Arabic (Syria)

ar-TN

Arabic (Tunisia)

ar-AE

Arabic (U.A.E.)

ar-YE

Arabic (Yemen)

hy-AM

Armenian (Armenia)

zh-HK

Chinese (Hong Kong SAR, PRC)

zh-MO

Chinese (Macao SAR)

zh-SG

Chinese (Singapore)

hr-BA

Croatian (Bosnia and Herzegovina)

dv-MV

Divehi (Maldives)

fa-IR

Farsi (Iran)

gu-IN

Gujarati (India)

he-IL

Hebrew (Israel)

hi-IN

Hindi (India)

kn-IN

Kannada (India)

kk-KZ

Kazakh (Kazakhstan)

syr-SY

Syriac (Syria)

ta-IN

Tamil (India)

te-IN

Telugu (India)

th-TH

Thai (Thailand)

ur-PK

Urdu (Pakistan)

vi-VN

Vietnamese (Vietnam)
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Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V – Guests VMs have slow performance – Change you adapter settings

If you are experiencing very slow or ‘jittery’ network performance when attempting to connect to them using remote desktop or file shares, then it may well be down to a couple of settings on your adaptors.

I had this experience on two types of network cards. A Marvell Yukon 88E8056 and a Realtek RTL8187. After much head bashing I found various bits of info about the network adaptor settings and made the following changes.

On the Host Hyper-V Server

On all network adaptor configuration I disabled the following

  • IPv4 Checksum Offload
  • Large Send Offload (IPv4)
  • TCP Checksum Offload (IPv4)

 

This seemed to do most of the work, but just to be sure I also tackled the guests.

On the Guest VMs

On all network adapter configuration I disabled the following

  • IPv4 Checksum Offload
  • Large Send Offload Version 2(IPv4)
  • TCP Checksum Offload (IPv4)

 

If these don’t work for you then I have also heard of success switching to the legacy network adaptor in the guest VM. Also ensure that your flow control is enabled on your host NICs.

Adaptor configuration

To get to the adaptor settings open the ‘Network and Sharing Center’, click on ‘Change adaptor settings’, then right-click on the adaptor and select properties. Now click the ‘Configure’ button.

 

Windows Server Backup – Can’t handle greater than 2TB Volumes

I have just discovered that Windows Server Backup on Windows server 2008 R2 is incapable of backing up any volume 2TB or over. This, it turns out, is due to a VHD file limit. Backup essentially creates a VHD for each volume in the backup, which is great for recovery, but causes this annoying problem.

The not very helpful message you will receive if you try a full server backup when one of the volumes is too large is

“Volumes larger than 2088958 megabytes cannot be protected.”

 

The work-around is to not do full volume backups, but make your selection of folders. Choose ‘Custom’ backup configuration and then just select all the folders on the volume that is too large.

 

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Easy guide to configuring Windows 2008 Firewall for SQL 2008 R2

After installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows 2008 server you will need to configure the firewall (if it’s turned on!) to allow access to the SQL server. Here is the simple method using the interface and assumes the following:

  • The SQL Instance is the default (first installed)
  • The ports have not been manually configured
  • Nothing too exotic like database mirroring is required.
  1. Open the Firewall either from the Control panel

    or by running WF.msc
  2. There are 3 default firewall profiles. One or more can be active depending on what and how you have configured your NICs. You will need to ensure you are editing the correct profile. Here you can see that mine is on a domain, so my Domain Profile is Active.
  3. Select ‘Inbound Rules’ in the left hand pane.
  4. Click on ‘New Rule…’ in the right actions pane.
  5. select Port Rule Type and click Next>
  6. Set TCP and Specific local Ports to 1433 and click Next>
  7. Leave the default of ‘Allow the connection’ and click Next>
  8. If you don’t ever want SQL to be directly accessible on a Public network (assuming you are going to ever connect your SQL server directly to the internet for some reason!!) then un-check the ‘Public’. Otherwise just click Next>
  9. Name it SQLPort and give it a description and click Finish.

That will enable inbound connections to your SQL Server. If you are also enabling SQL Browser Service then you will need to add UDP Port 1434 too another inbound rule.

If you have more than one instance of SQL then you will need to set the port and create rules for them.

For full details on ports and setting it up go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc646023(v=SQL.105).aspx

SQL script to kill all connections to a SQL Server database

I have finally perfected a nice script for killing connections to databases. Although basic, I found many of the ones I google’d, had one problem or another that stopped them working straight away, which just wastes time. This one works! I have just used it.

Just replace the database name and it’s good. It is easy to alter it to work across a list of databases too.

-- =============================================
-- Author: Nicholas Rogoff
-- Create date: 04/03/2010
-- Description: Script that Kills all connections to a database
-- except the current one
-- =============================================
SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO
SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO
DECLARE @execSql NVARCHAR(1000)
DECLARE @databaseName VARCHAR(100)
DECLARE @NoKilled INT

-- *** CHANGE THE NAME OF THE DATABASE *** ---
SET @databaseName = '#### Replace this with a database name here ####'
PRINT 'START: Killing active connections to the "' + @databaseName + '" database'

-- Count Connections
select @NoKilled = COUNT(*)
from master.dbo.sysprocesses
where db_name(dbid) = @databaseName
 and
 DBID <> 0
 and
 spid <> @@spid

-- Create the sql to kill the active database connections
set @execSql = ''
select @execSql = @execSql + 'kill ' + convert(char(10), spid) + ' '
from master.dbo.sysprocesses
where db_name(dbid) = @databaseName
 and
 DBID <> 0
 and
 spid <> @@spid

exec (@execSql)

PRINT 'END: Killed "' + CAST(@NoKilled AS VARCHAR(4))
+ '" active connections to the "' + @databaseName + '" database'
GO

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How to bulk unblock files in Windows 7 or Server 2008

In Windows 7 (actually any of the latest Windows releases) you will find that files copied to your local drives are not trusted until you right-click on them and in the properties click the ‘Unblock’ button. This is all very well for one or two files, but gets extremely tedious with more. It turns out to be related to NTFS’s ability to allow alternate data streams.

So here is a simple method of mass or bulk unblocking files.

  1. Download the Sysinternals Streams.exe from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897440.aspx
  2. I find Sysinternals so useful I create a ‘SysInternals’ folder on my C: drive and then put this into my ‘path’ environment variable so that I can run them from anywhere. However, if this is too much then the easiest is to copy the streams.exe to the root folder you wish to have files unblocked.
  3. In a command windows (with Admin privileges), use ‘cd’ to navigate to your folder.
  4. Type the command ‘streams –s –d subfoldername’ and press enter.