Windows 7 Backup fails with I/O Error: 0x8078002A

Long story short, the reason this error occurs in general is because the partition is formatted with a sector size of 4kB. This is not supported in Windows 7, but is in Windows 8.
It is frequently experienced with external drives because people often reformat them before using them. Why? They ship with a whole lot of substandard bundled software which can take GB's of space.

When you reformat the drive with the Windows format and default settings, it will create a partition with a sector size of 4kB. The error with Windows Backup occurs because the System Image backup only supports a sector size of 512 bytes.

So the solution is to delete the partition and reformat with a sector size of 512 bytes.

First of all, you can check your drive's current settings with this command:

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo DRIVE_LETTER:

You will see something like this:

Bytes Per Sector  :               4096             <<< this needs to be 512

Bytes Per Physical Sector :       <Not Supported>

Bytes Per Cluster :               4096

Bytes Per FileRecord Segment    : 1024

For Western Digital drives you can use their WD Quick Formatter utility.

For others, you may look for a similar utility on the manufacturers website, or a third party utility. I haven't tried any myself, but I did find PC Disk which may help.

References:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsbackup/thread/889b01be-d333-4fc7-b005-e12b7b236ad7

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/6618/session/L3RpbWUvMTMxMzUzNzc5My9zaWQvT1hrMSpJQms%3D

Microsoft ASP.NET 4.0 Chart Resources

I'm working on a project using the ASP.NET 4.0 Chart controls (System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting) at the moment and I thought I'd collect the useful resources here. Like many parts of the .NET Framework, the documentation is not so great, but the information is out there if you know where to look.

• MSDN - the official documentation resource. You will find this useful at times but it is rather terse.
• Custom Properties List - many chart types have additional properties which are not directly exposed in the designer. You need to set these in the code-behind, or via the CustomProperties parameter which is available on most Chart elements.
• ASP.NET 4.0 Chart samples - this is probably the best place to start to learn how to accomplish your specific goals.
• Numeric formatting - for chart label formatting
• ASP.Net Chart Forum - some decent examples here
• Alex Gorev's Blog - 3+ years old but does contain a lot of useful information which is still relevant.
• StackOverflow - ask a question here if you get stuck!

Adding the HTML 5 Facebook Like Button to Blogger

Facebook Like buttons are a cool feature to add to your blog. They really do work to drive more engaged traffic to your precious posts.

The reason is they are not just a static AddThis/ShareThis type of button. Those things never really worked very well. Facebook's buttons, by contrast, add social proof (or lack thereof) to your posts. They do this by:

• showing how many people already like the page
• showing photos of these people

They also provide a very easy way for people to quickly share content with their friends. Since 50% of Facebook's 800 million users log in every day, the chances of someone browsing your blog being already logged in to Facebook is pretty high. If they are logged in, when they see the Like button, they literally need to press it and your blog's title, URL, description, and image is instantly posted to their wall. Within seconds others will see it, and may comment, or click through to your site.

So the bottom line is: leverage the astoundingly lively Facebook ecosystem to get more clicks to your site. More importantly, these clicks are coming with a pre-recommendation from their Facebook friend.

Rules of thumb for Facebook buttons:

1. Make sure the Like/Share/Send is referencing the actual post URL, not the blog's home URL.
2. Include them at the end of the post - just after the content - so when people have finished reading, it's the next logical step.
3. Make them prominent and try to nicely integrate them into your page layout.
4. Customise:
1. Choose the word Like/Recommend depending on the context. Like is suitable for most sites, but Recommend might be better for product reviews, music, movies, etc..
2. Use the light/dark colour theme to best match your site's look.
5. Use Open Graph tags to maximise the impact of your integration - more about that later.

How to Integrate the HTML 5 Facebook Like Button Into Blogger

In a blogging platform like Wordpress, just use a plugin to insert the Like Button - it's the easiest way. But on Blogger, it's not so simple. Having said that, if you want total control, you can use the instructions below to include the Like Button right in your Wordpress Theme's post.php, category.php, or any other relevant file.

I suggest using the HTML 5 code because it's the most simple to integrate. Most browsers should be able to handle it, and this is increasing each day. In addition, the mobile world is heavily investing in HTML 5 so it helps ensure the button will work on mobile browsers too.

If you really can't use HTML 5, you can use the XFBML option with one extra step, or the Iframe version. Keep in mind the Iframe will be blocked by some user's configurations, and does not support the Send button.

1. Go to https://developers.facebook.com/apps
2. Set up an Application for your site. If you are only interested in the Like Button, you really just need the App ID, so don't worry too much about what you enter here unless you actually want to create a proper App related to your site.
3. Then go to:  https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
4. Configure the button
5. Put anything in the url, e.g. http://test.com - we will change this later
6. Click Get Code
7. The code will pop up - make sure you are looking at the HTML 5 tab.
8. At the top, select the Facebook App you just created.
9. Select everything in the first box and copy it to the clipboard.
10. Now go into your Blogger Dashboard
11. In the blog you want to modify, go to Template, then click Edit HTML (I am using the latest Blogger Dashboard, if you can't find this, let me know in the Comments.), then click Proceed.
12. Click 'Expand Widget Templates'
13. Add the Javascript Facebook SDK code:
1. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the HTML window, and paste the Facebook code just above the </html> tag.
2. Then make a blank line after the <script> tag and before the </script> tag.
3. After the <script> tag, add:  //<![CDATA[
4. Before the <script> tag, add:   //]]>
5. This makes sure the javascript remains intact.
6. By the way, Blogger will move this code higher up in the template when you save it. I found that it's easy to add it here, then let Blogger do its thing.
14. Add the Facebook Like button code:
1. Go back to the Facebook Like Button Developer page and copy the code from the second box.
2. Search for "<div class='post-footer'>"
3. Just after this line, paste the Facebook code.
4. Now we need to edit the URL.
5. In the code you just pasted, change the data-href attribute to: expr:data-href="data:post.url". The entire line of code should look something like this: <div class="fb-like" expr:data-href="data:post.url" data-send="true" data-width="450" data-show-faces="true"></div>
6. Copy the line you just edited.
7. Search again for "<div class='post-footer'>" to find the mobile section of the template, and paste the line in again, after the line with "<div class='post-footer'>".
15. Click Preview and check how it all looks.
16. When you are happy with it, click Save Template.
17. That's it! You may like to change the built in Blogger widgets to remove the Facebook button, as now it's redundant.

Here are some screenshots to help you:

Facebook SDK code at bottom of template

The code for adding the button to the post

That's all you need to do to integrate the button, but we can do a bit more by adding the Open Graph information to the template's meta tags.

Adding Open Graph Information to your Blogger Blog

I don't know much about Open Graph, but I assume it will become more and more used by Facebook. They releases a new version last year, so this shows that they are committed to it.

In relation to the Like Button, it allows you to better control what actually gets posted to the user's wall.

You basically need to add six meta tags. You can generate these on this page and then modify them slightly for blogger. Again these instructions can be pretty easily adapted for use with Wordpress Themes.

Read about how Open Graph works.

On the Facebook page:

1. Leave Title blank - we will modify this later
2. Under Type, select Article, or something else if it makes more sense.
3. URL: leave blank
4. Image: leave blank unless you have a URL to a logo you want included. If so, paste in the full URL to the image. In Blogger, I don't know of a way to dynamically insert image URLs from a given post, but this is pretty easy in Wordpress.
   
   I have noticed that if you leave this tag out of your template, Facebook will automatically grab the first image from the post when someone posts it to their wall. So you can just leave it out unless you want to post a specific image.
   
5. Site name: leave blank
6. Admin: leave with the ID already included.
7. Click Get Tags and copy the output.

Now to your Blogger template:

1. Again go to Edit Template in Blogger.
2. Expand Widget Templates
3. At the top of the HTML box, find the line with the text:  <meta expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' name='description'/>
4. Paste the tags you copied under this line.
5. Now we need to edit them like so:

<meta property="og:title" expr:content="data:blog.pageTitle" />

<meta property="og:type" content="article" />

<meta property="og:url" expr:content="data:blog.url" />

<meta property="og:image" expr:content="http://test.com/image.png" />

<meta property="og:site_name" expr:content="data:blog.title" />

<meta property="fb:admins" content="your user id, e.g. 123456789" />


It's also recommended to add the following tag:

<meta property="og:description" expr:content="data:blog.metaDescription" />

If the tag content is blank, you should not leave them in your template, as it will cause an error.

Now save your template and test your Like Buttons!!

Any questions - please fire away in the comments.

Check out TFS files directly from SQL Server Management Studio

The other day I explained how to configure the external tools feature of Edit Pad Pro to allow direct checking out of files from TFS.

Today I did the same thing in SQL Server Management Studio.

Configuring TFS Checkout in SQL Server Management Studio

Here are pictorial instructions:

Command: we are using the environment variable created by VS2012 to provide a generic path to the TF.exe command line tool. If you are not using VS2012, open a command prompt, type "set" and see which path is closest. Alternatively, just put in the absolute path to tf.exe.

If you do not have Visual Studio at all you can install the standalone Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2012 which includes tf.exe.

Arguments: we are passing the "checkout" command to tf.exe with a parameter of the full path to the .sql file we are working on.

Use Output window: this is optional but it will show you the information returned by the tf.exe command line tool.

Using the External Tool

This is simple. The tool item you just created now shows up in the Tools menu. Just click it and it will checkout the current file you have open in the IDE.

Last Words

There is a small annoyance: SSMS will try to save all unsaved files before running the external tool. In this case, if we've modified the file then it will try and save over a Read-only file, causing it to try and Save As to a new file name.

I believe this is a bug in SSMS, or a well-intentioned, yet obstructive feature. I can't see a way to disable this behaviour. Just press Escape to avoid this - the external tool will then run.

Let me know in the comments if you need any more information!

How to automate TFS checkouts from EditPad Pro

I am a long time user of the great EditPad Pro from JGsoft. I use it for text file manipulation and basic programming. I starting using it when it was at version 3 or 4; purchased it at version 5, and even upgraded my licence to 6 and 7!

You may find Text Editors boring - understandable! They are one of those types of software that is not particularly exciting, but for certain people, they are an essential tool. And if they perform slowly or lack intricate features, they will be quickly superseded by something better.

Developers need a powerful text editor. End of story.

As a developer you have to deal with a multitude of file types - config files, data import/export files, source code, database queries, and so on. Often you need to quickly search files, or change their contents and produce a new file.

EditPad Pro is an awesome tool for getting in there and quickly doing what you need. As I mentioned, I've used it for many years

It's an indispensable tool for me. This is due to features such as:

• Customisable syntax highlighting for a very wide range of file types, e.g. sql, vbs, sh, XML
• Powerful regular expression search and replace (actually I also bought RegexBuddy from JGsoft to make constructing these easier)
• Stable handling of very large text files
• Fast operation - fast to load, never laggy
• External tool support - which is the point of this post!

Integrating TFS checkout into EditPad Pro

In my current job, we use Team Foundation Server for source control. Visual Studio 2010 has great integration, in that it automatically checks out files when you try to edit them. 

However, we also store various other file types in TFS, which we do not edit in Visual Studio. Personally, I use EditPad Pro (EPP) to edit these. I have been manually checking out the files when I need to edit them using the Shell Integration provided by the TFS Power Tools. This works fine, but becomes tedious. 

Then I remembered that I could integrate the TFS command line application into EPP!

The screenshots below will show you how to do it, but in brief:

1. Open a file from your TFS working copy, that is currently checked in (Read Only)
2. Click on the Tools menu, then Configure Tools...
3. Configure the command line and add a keyboard shortcut. If you want it in the toolbar, you can check 'Show caption on toolbar'
4. Close the Tools dialogue and press your keyboard shortcut.
5. Your file is now checked out!

Now a bit more detail...

Tool Definition

This is where you set up the command line to run, and add the placeholders which pass the information from EPP to the command line tool.

In this case it is very simple:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\TF.exe" checkout "%FILE%"

Your path to TF.exe may differ - just search your C drive.

The important part to note is you need the "" around the %FILE% placeholder to ensure that if you have spaces in the path to the file, this will be handled correctly.

TF.exe does not require the working folder to be set.

Tool Definition - set up the command line here

Files dialog

You don't really need to set anything up here, but if you like, you can check 'Reload the current file'. This ensures the latest version checked out from TFS will be displayed. EPP should automatically reload the file anyway though, so it's not strictly required. (You can set this behaviour in the main Preferences dialogue, under Open Files: check 'Automatically reload the active file if it was modified on disk.')

This section may be more useful to you if you want to do something like save your local copy in another temp file before you check out. You could tick the second option to do this.

If you are setting up a TFS check-in task, then you would check the first option to make sure the file is saved before checking in.

Tool file actions - optional

Standard I/O Dialogue

This is useful in case we get any errors. In this case, I set up the standard error to redirect to the message panel. This means you will see any errors if they occur (e.g. TFS down)

You can also set this to save the standard output to the message panel or to a new file. We don't need it in this case, because the standard output just tells us the file was checked out!

These settings are most used for tools which take your file's contents, change them, and produce modified output. With these tools, it's ideal to set the standard output to capture to a new tab. I have done this when using perl scripts to format files, etc.

Standard I/O - where to send the command line output

So there you go - look how easy it is to integrate an external tool into your text editor - and save yourself a lot of tedious clicks AND time!

If you are interested in trying out EditPad Pro - it's your lucky day! You can get a 30 day trial of EPP right here. Once the trial ends, it just switches to the Lite version, so you can keep using it forever.