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Techemistry Blog

Daily Tip - Update AddRemoveProgramsIcon (and other properties) in a Visual Studio Installer Project

6/11/2019 8:35:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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 would allow the installer to: Name the application correctly (if a friendly name) Specify other text values like Author, Description, Manufacturer, Title, ProductName, etc. ...

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ZeroSSL with IIS 10

5/3/2019 5:11:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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 has how to successfully complete the process. Here's my suggestions that allowed me to get it working: In IIS, create a Certificate Request (CR). Copy the contents of the CR to the clipboard....

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MinerGate.com Review - Mixed Emotions

2/3/2018 6:44:00 AM -- Ted Krapf

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Account Breach Monitoring

9/20/2017 3:36:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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 the users doing something crazy that could compromise the security of the system? As with social engineering, the weakest link in a well designed security model is usually the users. So, what happens if one of the users (maybe...

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DBML Visualizer VERY Slow - solved!

3/29/2017 8:15:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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Poor Man's SQL Log Shipping (Kinda)

12/23/2016 9:54:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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Excel Column Letter To Number.com

4/8/2016 3:06:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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 (or letters) to its numerical value. For example, BD = column #56. I frequently use this for figuring out the column number when doing a VLOOKUP. Or when I'm working on very wide spreadsheets. You can find the free Excel Column Letter T...

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Easy & Powerful Ecommerce Solution

4/5/2016 7:58:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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asp:Menu Flicker on Page_Load - Solved

7/13/2015 1:48:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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Offline ClickOnce app with command line parameters

3/9/2015 9:46:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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 trick you can use to make offline ClickOnce command line parameters function. The scenario is this: Client has a ClickOnce app that gets updated (redeployed) by their developer frequen...

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Windows Server 2008 Install DLL into GAC

1/23/2015 8:48:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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IIS7 FTP 530 Home Directory Inaccessible SOLVED!

12/1/2014 10:53:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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 you want a simple FTP site so you can maybe publish web content or simply have one user account, it's a quick solution without adding any software to your box. But the second you even start to think about user directory isolation - RUN....

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Project Time Tracking - The Best Solution

4/2/2014 1:50:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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, expensive, or just simply way over complicated. So I decided that I'd just create something for myself to u...

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Transaction Express / TransFirst API & ACH Payment Integration

3/31/2014 3:20:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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Dynamic PayPal Buttons without using tags

10/16/2013 3:21:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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DNN Live Chat

9/6/2013 9:00:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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 customers transition through the changes. I was very surprised to find a real lack of quality Live Chat services out there that fell into a happy medium between Good Features and Free. So after toiling around with a few canned solutions and service...

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"We Are Already Cyborgs"

8/15/2013 1:13:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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Keywords, SEO, and Internet Ads

8/13/2013 2:42:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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 research will pay off. Below are some fast tips I recently sent to a client that I thought I'd share.... You always want to avoid what I call Keyword Stuffing. Google’s spider (called Panda) that crawls and indexes the web is VER...

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Placebo Buttons -- they are everywhere!

7/2/2013 8:03:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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?

DNN Custom Modules - Locations, Simple Product Catalog, Form Builder and more

5/20/2013 8:35:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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 CMS platform, and I've built a nice set of custom modules to help my clients get the results they need. Here are a few of them . . . MultiForm DNN Module ...

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Mobile - Looking Good (and Easy!)

5/9/2013 7:53:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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Oh Silly Hyphen - Prevent Line Break on Hyphen

4/29/2013 7:27:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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. Internet Explorer would render the word on two lines instead of one. This would also happen when zoom levels other than 100% were set in other browsers and/or when the responsive design would kick in. In other words, the sentence format...

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Graphics Goodness - Fluid Dynamics Rendering

4/23/2013 4:25:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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One-Way Trip To Mars -- You can sign up soon

4/16/2013 5:33:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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Combine Excel Documents Using C#

3/15/2013 12:47:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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 simple enough right? The first thing we tried together was scouring the web for a VBA script to do this. Seems simple, get a list of the files in a directory, open each doc, and copy and paste its contents into the main docume...

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Stupid chain letter spam

2/6/2013 3:51:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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Facebook, Amazon, and Google going the way of Rome?

1/28/2013 8:18:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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End of the World?

12/18/2012 4:18:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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Why Get A New Website

4/23/2012 4:13:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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Reverse Sale: The Answer?

5/7/2012 4:13:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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Busy Beavers & Domain Registrations

8/16/2012 3:57:00 PM -- Ted Krapf

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, or guilty yourself, of purchasing tons of extra domain names for a single business? Even ones that aren't related to the business name, but end up pointing to the same website? I h...

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