Nathon's Tumblr Blog

Currently I'm a Sr. Software Engineer at a large corporation. I have been a software developer for over 10 years and have been a Systems Administrator and Network Administrator for almost 20 years. Personally I'm married to my beautiful wife and we have two incredible children.

[nathon]

AI Assisted Development

Overview AI has been the hot button topic for a while now and we’ve been using it for development, but personally I haven’t had the chance to really put it through its paces yet. I’ve only been able to use it for some light development and document related work. However, I recently took a vacation and had several days to myself and an itch to develop. What better time to see what it could really…

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[nathon]

Precision X1 Stops Working (Logo Only)

Precision X1 Stops Working (Logo Only)

Overview The Precision X1 application is used to configure fan speeds, monitor temperatures, adjust LED settings and more. However, I noticed that after upgrading from an EVGA RTX 2070 Super FTW3 Ultra Gaming to an EVGA RTX 3090 Super FTW3 Ultra, it wouldn’t run properly anymore. When searching online, you’ll find a number of issues regarding Precision X1 not starting or having reduced…

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[nathon]

Enable Bluetooth Audio 2010 Mercedes E550

Overview

I recently purchased a 2010 Mercedes-Benz E550 Luxury with a Harmon Kardon entertainment system. Something that surprised me is that it allowed bluetooth phone connections, but did not support bluetooth audio.

I read online that people were able to have the dealership perform a firmware update to enable this. However, when I contacted them they said they didn’t think that was possible,…

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[nathon]

WSUS Post Install Failure

WSUS Post Install Failure

Overview

I was recently trying to install Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) on a Windows Server 2012 R2 server I have. However, the Post-Deployment Configuration task kept failing. Unfortunately the log file wasn’t a lot of help, since the error was fairly generic. In this article, we’ll walk you through resolving this issue.

The Error

When encountering this issue, you’ll see the following…

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[nathon]

Browser Immediately Closes When Debugging

I recently ran into an issue while developing, that it looks like many others have experienced as well. A search didn’t provide a good resolution to the problem. However, I was able to fix it and with a far easier solution than many articles I’d read.

The Problem

The problem occurred when I started a debug session. It was still compiling when I noticed a capital letter in a region label that…

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[nathon]

Remove Multiple Blank Rows in Excel

Remove Multiple Blank Rows in Excel

Overview

Sometimes I run into situations where I have an Excel file with a lot of blank rows that I want to remove. A common scenario for me is an Internet Information Services (IIS) log file. These don’t contain blank lines, but they have a header that repeats throughout the file, each day. Since I can’t properly convert the text into Excel columns with these present, I have to remove them…

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[nathon]

Auto-Build Windows Forms Menu From Name Space

Auto-Build Windows Forms Menu From Name Space

Overview

Spanning the decade plus I’ve been a developer and before that as a systems administrator, I’ve written a seemingly endless supply of small programs to help me do different little jobs. This has ranged from little utilities I designed to iterate folders and rename, sort, etc. files (too inefficient to do by hand) to some pretty decent code generators. The problem is that most of these…

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[nathon]

Accessing Session State in an HttpModule in MVC

Accessing Session State in an HttpModule in MVC

Overview

HttpModules can be very useful for a lot of tasks. They are especially handy when trying to accomplish logging within a .NET web application. However, they also come with quite a few hurtles to overcome. In this article we’ll discuss some of those challenges as well as ways to get around them. In the end we will have an HttpModule which can access the session state in order to log the…

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[nathon]

XML Comment on 'X' Has CRef Attribute That Could Not Be Resolved

XML Comment on ‘X’ Has CRef Attribute That Could Not Be Resolved

Here’s a scenario that a lot of us developers have probably faced or are still facing. You’re developing an application and you want to provide really good documentation. So, you dutifully XML document every single method, property, etc. in the project. However, you notice that when you build the project there are a number of Warnings similar to the following.

XML comment on ‘Namespace.Method()’…

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[nathon]

High DPI Compatibility Fix

High DPI Compatibility Fix

Overview

With today’s computers having high DPI/PPI (Dots-per-Inch/Pixels-per-Inch) screens, you can start experiencing some problems with the way certain pieces of software render things like buttons, dialog boxes, etc. Here is an example of this in CadSoft Eagle.

Although the menu appears normal (i.e. File, Edit, etc.), the toolbar icons are practically microscopic. There can also be problems…

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[nathon]

Use Assembly Title, Description, Company, Copyright, Version in C#

Use Assembly Title, Description, Company, Copyright, Version in C#

Overview

When you edit the properties of a project in Visual Studio, you can enter a Title, Description, Company, Copyright and Version in the Assembly Information section. The question becomes, how do you use these in a project so that you have a single source of information? In this article I’ll walk you through the steps used to access the assembly information so you can easily use it…

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[nathon]

Move Windows User Folders to Another Drive

Move Windows User Folders to Another Drive

Overview

Modern computers are often coming with a small solid state drive (SSD) for the primary operating system (OS) and then an additional standard or physical hard drive to provide more storage. Since SSDs are typically much smaller than their non-solid state counterparts, this can cause problems with the SSD drive running out of space. This issue isn’t just applicable to SSDs though. This can…

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[nathon]

Windows 10 Activation Failure

Windows 10 Activation Failure

Overview

When attempting to activate volume license versions of Windows 10 you can often end up experiencing problems. This article will explain how to determine if this is the problem you’re experiencing as well as how to successfully activate Windows.

The Symptoms

With this issue, when you attempt to activate a volume license version of Windows 10 you receive the following screen saying that…

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[nathon]

Flashing Screen & Hyper-V in Windows 10

Flashing Screen & Hyper-V in Windows 10

Flashing Screen & Windows 10

As of the time of writing this article, I have just received my new laptop. This system is to replace my primary HP laptop that died a few months ago after being in faithful service for over 10 years. Here’s what I got.

  System Specifications

Alienware 17 R3

Microsoft Windows 10 Professional

Intel Core i7-6820HK (Quad-Core, 8MB Cache, Dynamically Overclocked up to…

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[nathon]

Guide to Building a Hackintosh

I came across this article on building a “Hackintosh”. According to the article “A hackintosh is simply any non-Apple hardware that has been made—or “hacked”—to run Mac OS X.”

Now I’m not a big Apple fan. I run mostly Microsoft technologies (yes, I’m a bit of a fan boy) and some Linux systems as well. However, as a technology person my goal is to learn as much as I can about everything I can. For…

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[nathon]

New Lab Go Fund Me Campaign!

New Lab Go Fund Me Campaign!

New Lab!

I am starting a Go Fund Me campaign for a new lab. I’ve been running this blog for a number of years now. It started out as a way for me to document the issues I ran across in my line of work so that I could quickly solve them again if I ever encountered them again.

Well now I think it’s time to go video! Don’t worry. This blog isn’t going anywhere! I still plan on contributing to it as…

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[nathon]

GPS Tracking is a Search!

GPS Tracking is a Search!

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today (3/30/2015) that if the government puts a GPS tracker in any of your personal effects, it constitutes a search and is governed by the 4th amendment. This is a huge win for privacy, over-invasive government and personal freedom.

You can read more about the ruling in this ruling for Torrey Dale Grady vs. North Carolina.

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/1…

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