Remote Desktop Copy & Paste problem

I am consistently amazed by the wealth of information available in the blogosphere. Here is an example:

I spend a lot of time working in Remote Desktop sessions, and lately I had noticed that quite often I would lose the ability to copy and paste text between my local machine and the Remote Desktop session. This finally became annoying enough that I decided to research the issue. After a quick Google search, the first link took me to a blog post by Pinal Dave that explained how to solve my exact problem. The summary is that the problem can be solved by following these steps in the Remote Desktop session:

1. Open Task Manager
2. Kill the “rdpclip.exe” process
3. Restart the process by using Start >> Run >> rdpclip.exe

This simple solution has saved me a lot of aggravation.

XNA Tutorials

I have wanted to experiment with XNA ever since Microsoft released it. Well, over the last few weeks I have finally had enough semi-free time to dive into some of the code. My eventual goal is to create a racing game, so when I discovered that there is a Racing Game Starter Kit I could not help but start by hopping straight into its code. However, I quickly found out that the Starter Kit was going to be overwhelming without picking up some fundamental gaming code knowledge first. The next step was to check out the 2D and 3D Game tutorials. This turned out to be a much better starting point, and I now feel prepared to move on to some more advanced learning. Now, I just have to hope that Xboxs are still available for retail sale by the time I actually complete a real game. :-)

The elusive Orca download

Recently, I was having problems with a Windows Installer Merge Module and turned to the web for help. Upon searching, I found a suggestion to use Orca to edit the .msm file. The site simply stated to download Orca from Microsoft, so I searched MSDN for Orca and found that it is only available in the “Windows SDK Components for Windows Installer Developers”. This sounded simple enough, so I downloaded the SDK. After a brief download, I began the installation process and was horrified to find that it was going to require another 2GB+ download for a full installation. I was in a hurry, so I de-deselected the samples and documentation, which brought the install down to a more manageable size.

After the install completed, I happily navigated to Start->Microsoft Windows SDK -> Tools. Hmmm, no Orca in sight... I was just about to bite the bullet and run the full installer when I came across Aaron Stebner's blog post explaining how to get Orca, complete with a direct link for the software.

This saved me a lot of wasted time waiting on the download, just to use one small tool.

Browser shortcuts

Lately I have found myself searching for deals on used parts for our Jeep. As part of this routine, there are several sites that I navigate to, typically opening them in multiple browser tabs. As lazy as it may sound, I got tired of right-clicking items in my favorites list to open the site in a new tab. I decided it would be easier if I had a shortcut for opening all of the sites at once. I know that IE allows you to set multiple home page tabs, but this was not what I wanted because I don’t want the sites to load every time I open a browser.

I decided that a batch file might be an easy solution, and began researching IE’s command line options. While IE, does have a nice selection of options, unfortunately I could not get IE7 or IE8 to yield the results I wanted (the sites were opened in new windows instead of tabs). However, I got exactly what I wanted with Firefox (not a big issue because I routinely switch between the two browsers anyway). I just created the batch file in Notepad and saved it as a .bat file on my desktop. Here are example contents of the file:

cd\"Program Files (x86)\mozilla firefox\"
start firefox.exe http://www.cnn.com http://www.msn.com http://www.yahoo.com

After creating the batch file, it dawned on me that it would be easier to create a copy of my Firefox desktop shortcut, rename it appropriately, and then simply modify the shortcut’s target with the desired sites, as shown here:

Both methods are a great way to quickly navigate to a group of sites.

Strings....

Today I was doing some research on the performance of strings in .NET, and as I started a Google search, I noticed in the dynamic search results that there are over a million more results for String Theory than String Bikini. There are obviously too many people using the web for serious work, and not enough using it for more perverse reasons. :-) Just some humor, to start the day.

Internet Explorer operation aborted

For several weeks now, I had been experiencing a problem in Internet Explorer (and just had not had time to research, or correct it). Almost every time I navigated to a page on MSDN, the page would display briefly, I would get an “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://msdn.microsoft.com/xxxx. Operation aborted” message, and then the page would be switched to a navigation error screen. I quickly discovered that pressing the back button would allow the page to display correctly.

Since I work with a lot of Microsoft products, and spend a lot of time on MSDN, this was becoming very annoying. So, today became the today to try and solve the problem. It was occurring on my work PC, but not my home PC. Both are running Windows Vista and IE7. Since one was ok, and the other was not, I thought the problem probably caused by an IE security setting. Rather than digging through IE’s huge list of security options for possible culprits, I decided to search the web to see if anyone else was experiencing the problem.

First, I found this discussion listing a bug in sitemeter.com that had caused issues on a lot of sites; but this bug had already been corrected. The thread also suggested IE addins as a possible cause, but this was not the cause for my issue, either. Another suggestion in the thread was to Reset IE’s options, but this did not fix it for me either. There was also a link to a blog post describing how this error is typically caused by JavaScript manipulation of the HTML DOM. The post stated the problem has been corrected in IE8. Soooooo, I am now running a beta of IE8, which seems to have corrected the problem. Hopefully, it does not introduce new problems!

On my next visit to MSDN, I was promptly greeted with a JavaScript popup message that Microsoft was taking a survey(which was not appearing previously). So, it looks like the survey was the root of my problem, but I have not determined why it occurred on one PC and not the other. At least IE8 seems to have solved it, for now.

VMWare Beeps

The other day I was doing some testing in a VMWare virtual machine, and kept getting an annoying beep every time a dialog box was displayed. I changed every sound setting I could find, but could not get rid of the beep. So, it was time to begin google’ing. I found several recommend solutions that involved adding “mks.noBeep = TRUE” to a .ini file, but it seems that the file name, location, and syntax vary slightly depending on your OS and version of VMWare. Ultimately, the easy solution that worked for me was to:

Open Windows Device Manager on the virtual machine.
Go to the View menu and pick “Show hidden devices”.
Go to Non Plug and Play Devices; there is now a Beep item that can be disabled.

Problem solved.