Deep Insights in Microsoft .NET

I first found this article after I got an issue:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brada/archive/2005/08/10/449767.aspx Let me go around to clarifying this further, and how I re-verified this issue http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.environment.machinename.aspx MSDN clarifies that this is NETBIOS name. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBIOS Wikipedia clarifies that NETBIOS name has 16 characters, but Microsoft uses only 15 characters for the same. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.dns.gethostname.aspx This is what should be used.

One of my colleagues used to work for MS before and his job was to look at the windows crash logs and determine what went wrong. Most of the time, he used to find out that it was a problem with the processor or the drivers for some hardware components. As anyone who has ever tried to host servers by themselves know, it is critical to keep them updated so that the PC works fine. Especially when developers like us install 2008 R2 on a laptop and sometimes not all the drivers get installed properly. Windows Update does not always show missing or out of date drivers. Do the following which might surprise you: 1) Go to http://www.driverdetective.org/  and install their software. Do not install Norton with it. 2) Scan your laptop/ desktop/ server. 3) In most cases you will find some drivers out of date or not even installed. I saw this with a brand new server from Dell which did not have the chipset drivers installed. Once you find what is out of date or missing, it is easy to se

Sometimes, you might want to use the visual studio remote debugger between 2 servers - one in the domain, and the other outside it. Usually, if you try to do this, it will error out saying that the machine outside the domain cannot connect to your machine. Even if you try to put the credentials in the control panel - users area it will still not work. Well, you know that the remote debugger itself has an option for debugging without authentication. What I did not know was that Visual Studio 2010 SP1 can also debug without authentication. Just open the top combo box to see another option, if you select it, it will now let you debug, although note that this is not secure, so use this warily. Remember to first go to the server where you want to debug and open the remote debugger > Tools > Options > No Authentication, and Allow any user to debug. Then select transport as Remote (Native only with no authentication) in VS and the qualifier is the remote server name. The