Ted Krapf Consulting

Date: 12/3/2024 10:05:27 PM

Where's dark mode for Microsoft's SQL Server Management Studio?

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Date: 11/15/2023 10:03:29 AM

Ever since the Windows 11 Snipping Tool got its last major update, something changed. It was a minor change, but it has been driving me nuts. When you snip something, the Snipping Tool's window would fall to the background. While this can be helpful (saving you the step of getting it out of the way, and the snip has already been copied to the clipboard automatically), it's intensely annoying that you now need to hunt for a background windows when you first need to annotate the snip before pasting to your email, doc or whatever.

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Date: 11/15/2021 5:32:40 PM

We tried the Sense Energy Monitor to see if it would save us any money, and it sure did. The Sense Energy Monitor is an excellent product, that I highly recommend! This is the ultimate Dad-said "don't touch the thermostat" and "turn off the lights when you're not in there" tool.

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Date: 10/4/2021 12:17:10 PM

With the CPAP recall regarding their foam / chemical compound issue, my machine squealing like a banshee, and not sleeping for two weeks -- it was time to take matters into my own hands.

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Date: 10/20/2020 4:32:42 PM

If you ever have a problem of parsing a single "Name" column from a CSV or Excel doc, NameAPI.org has got you covered!

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Date: 6/15/2020 10:08:42 PM

I love NopCommerce, but as with anything else -- there's either too much (old) information, or not enough info out there about it. Welcome to the Internet. SMH. I recently had a client who configured NopCom with a quite a few Product Attributes, and we came to realize the NopCommerce's Search feature doesn't bother to search in the Product Attribute Names. No problem, we've got an app for that (well, not an app. More of a SQL hack)!

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Date: 6/15/2020 9:57:03 PM

I really recently had a client who needed their .NET Webforms site/app placed into an IFrame. The site would load, but it would never get past the login page. The answer was so simple when we finally discovered the cause.

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Date: 5/12/2020 12:07:18 PM

I recently was trying to apply a routine update to Visual Studio and during the VS Installer, kept getting the "Your machine is busy with another installation" message.

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Date: 4/13/2020 10:37:59 PM

A few months back, I started a custom Smart Thermostat project.  Prior to this project, I’d messed around with a few other demo projects, built an ESP/Stepper Motor + Google Assistant Dog Feeder, etc.  For the Smart Thermostat, to bui

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Date: 6/11/2019 8:35:00 PM

So this one drove me nuts.  It seems soooo simple. I have a Visual Studio 2017 solution with a Window Service Project and a Installer Project.  For the life of me, I could not figure out where to update the specific properties that w

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Date: 5/3/2019 5:11:00 PM

I have an IIS 10 server behind a VPN/Firewall, and was bound and determined to use Let's Encrypt even though the server can't be reached by Let's Encrypt to authorize the SSL certificate request. I ran across www.zerossl.com, but was very confused h

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Date: 9/20/2017 3:36:00 PM

As a software developer that has to deal with user accounts, one of the topics always in my mind is security.  Is the box/vm/host secured? Did we implement strong enough password/login rules? What ciphers are enabled? Have the rules changed? Are

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Date: 3/29/2017 8:15:00 PM

Greetings fellow coders! I've had this super annoying recurring issue with Visual Studio (2010, 2013, not sure about 2017 yet as I haven't started using it on a daily basis yet), the DBML visualizer, and Windows 10 --- the DBML visualizer is jus

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Date: 12/23/2016 9:54:00 PM

Hi all, A Very Happy Holidays to everyone out there!  It's been a very exciting and busy year helping clients with unique needs and solutions. I'm looking forward to what 2017 will bring! I recently was tasked by a client to come up wi

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Date: 4/8/2016 3:06:00 PM

Have you ever been working with a large Excel or other spreadsheet document and think, "man, I wish I could look up what the number equivalent of column BD is!"?  Me too! So I built a crazy simple web app that converts an Excel column letter (o

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Date: 4/5/2016 7:58:00 PM

Looking for a simple, beautiful, yet powerful e-commerce solution for your business?   Check out www.Shopify.com Shopify has beautiful themes, an amazingly simple and clean user interface, a really slick Apps add-on store to extend the functio

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Date: 7/13/2015 1:48:00 PM

Have an asp:menu that is flickering on (showing all the sub menus) on page_load and/or post back?  Of course you do, because that server control is pretty squirrely.   Here's the simple CSS fix that corrects the issue: <style type="

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Date: 3/9/2015 9:46:00 PM

So the need for a client's offline ClickOnce app to have command line parameters came up again. (oh boy). The Microsoft docs initially spec'd out that you can't do this when the ClickOnce app is an "offline" app.  But since .NET 3.1, there is a

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Date: 1/23/2015 8:48:00 PM

So first I want to say this has driven me crazy for days on end (an hour here, an hour there.  If you're here, you already have discovered that you can no longer (simply) drag and drop dll files into C:\windows\assembly and have them installed a

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Date: 12/1/2014 10:53:00 PM

So this post is definitely going to fall into the "rants" category of my blogging.   I can't tell you the number of times that I've attempted to setup Microsoft's IIS FTP services.  IIS6, IIS7, IIS7.5.  Now, don't get me wrong, if

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Date: 4/2/2014 1:50:00 PM

So the other day I set out to look for an app, a widget, a sidebar gadget or a web app that handled Time Keeping for project work.   I was surprised to find that while there are a lot of tools out there, many are lacking, cumbersome, expensiv

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Date: 3/31/2014 3:20:00 PM

This last week I had a client come to me with another interesting situation that needed a solution.  My client had previously sought out a cost effective and easy to administer 3rd party solution for taking checking account payments while havi

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Date: 10/16/2013 3:21:00 PM

A client of mine recently wanted to collect payments on her website for event registration with her PayPal account.  The catch was, Adults were $10 ea, Children (3-12) were $8 ea, and Children (3 & younger) were $5 ea. So I set out on an adv

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Date: 9/6/2013 9:00:00 PM

So the age old question... buy it or build it? Recently I was helping a client with their new ERP that my team and I developed for them.  Part of the ERP is public facing and we wanted to integrate a Live Chat feature to help the client's custo

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Date: 8/15/2013 1:13:00 PM

Crazy.. "If human history is the story of a creature who molts from ape to angel - or as Nietzsche claimed, from beast to Superman - then somewhere along the way it seems that we must become machines." -Erik Davis.     If you don't follow "

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Date: 8/13/2013 2:42:00 PM

Clients always have great questions about SEO, Keywords, and Internet Marketing.  What are some of the basics, gotchas, and where's a person or business to get started?  There is no magic bullet - sorry.  Like anything, hard work and r

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Date: 7/2/2013 8:03:00 PM

I thought this would be interesting to share.  I can't think of any computer or Internet graphical user interface (GUI) buttons that are merely placebos, but I've only been thinking about it for a second here.  Can you think of any?

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Date: 5/20/2013 8:35:00 PM

As I work with clients I come across special needs that the client will require on their website.  I want to remind everyone that I can custom build basically any functionality for your website.  Most of my clients are using the DotNetNuke

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Date: 5/9/2013 7:53:00 PM

What's all the buzz about? One of the new buzz words now for sometime has been Responsive Web Design.  What does it mean?  What does it mean for my business?   First a little back story.  Previous to the concept of Responsive

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Date: 4/29/2013 7:27:00 PM

Here's a cool thing I learned today.  I had an issue where a customer's webpage contained a word that required a hyphen to be grammatically correct: pre-plated.  The word pre-plated appeared at the end of a line in a set width column.  

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Date: 4/23/2013 4:25:00 PM

PhysXInfo seems to have solved a challenging tasks, making computer generated water look like water.  Now, I'm not talking about fluid rendering with the horsepower like ILM uses for movies like The Perfect Storm, but instead using a commercial

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Date: 4/16/2013 5:33:00 PM

Nonprofit organization, Mars-One.com, plans to fund a colonization of the Red Planet with a blend of crowd sourcing and ultimate reality TV.  Thus far, their plan is to acquire one million entries from private citizen for $25 each along with a 6

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Date: 3/15/2013 12:47:00 PM

A client yesterday had a common problem, "Ted I have 100+ Excel documents that I need to be able to quickly search through, and I'd like to combine all those work books into a single .xlsx file so that I can just search in one document." Sounds

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Date: 2/6/2013 3:51:00 PM

Infrequently I love getting chain letter spam, so that I can read through it, pick it apart, and then reply to the 100+ people that I was not BCC'd with.  Note the use of "infrequently".   It's bad enough to get spam, but to get it directly

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Date: 1/28/2013 8:18:00 PM

I just ran across an interesting article on Gizmodo that cited John Naughton at the Guardian's story about dominating e-giants eventually out living their dominance and becoming irrelevant in the market.  I thought both were fascinatin

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Date: 12/18/2012 4:18:00 PM

So, the Mayan's 'predicted' the end of the world?  Seems strange that they would do such a thing.  I guess every civilization has thought of their beginning and their demise.  As advanced as the Mayans were, their mathematics didn't ta

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Date: 8/16/2012 3:57:00 PM

It's been a while since my last blog entry -- life has been extraordinarily busy with IT and web development projects, some family transitions, and planning for my upcoming wedding to the girl of my dreams!   Have you ever run into a client

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Date: 5/7/2012 4:13:00 PM

How do you monetize your online presence?  If you are 'in business', I would think you are probably in the business of making money.  Are you running an eCommerce site?  Are you advertising to your visitors?  Are you selling a ser

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Date: 4/23/2012 4:13:00 PM

When customers visit your website does it look like a time capsule?  Was Bill Clinton still in office the last time you updated your site? Customers want to see new content; it's not a question of, it's a demand.  Take Facebook as exam

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