I'm using Outlook 2007 to connect to Exchange 2003 under SBS 2003. All of my rules are server-side. The rules are still in Outlook 2003 format, though I'm not sure if that matters for this issue. 

Recently I used a third-party program to restore a backup to my aging MPx220 SmartPhone. Upon connecting with ActiveSync, it overwrote my Inbox, Tasks, and Calendar in Outlook and thus Exchange. Bad.

Fortunately, my daily Exchange backup with the Backup Exec 10d Exchange option had run that morning, so I was able to restore the mailbox in short order.

Unfortunately, this messed up my rules in Outlook 2007. The rules were there, and they ran fine manually, but they would not run automatically when mail was received.

Article 232585 in the Symantec knowledge base pointed me in the right direction, but was not a full solution. It recommends exporting and importing the rules. When I did that, nothing seemed to change. All the rules were there, but only a couple of them were firing automatically. 

I thought maybe I could fix the server-side rules by looking at them in Outlook Web Access (OWA). It turns out that none of my rules can be editing in OWA (apparently because OWA can't handle the "stop processing more rules" directive). What's interesting is that OWA showed me that each rule appeared twice. The export/import must have duplicated them.

This gave me the idea for the following solution:

1. Print the list of rules from OWA in case you might need to recreate them manually.
2. Export the rules from Outlook 2007 to a .rwz file on your desktop.
3. Close Outlook 2007. From the command line, run "outlook /cleanrules" to delete all your server- and client-side rules. Close Outlook again.
4. Start Outlook normally. Import the rules that you exported in step 2 above.
   

Now you should only see one copy of the each rule in OWA, and they should be triggered automatically!

I recently upgraded my XP desktop to Service Pack 3, which includes an update to Remote Desktop Client 6.1.

Today I locked a Windows Server 2003 console session at a client site, then tried later to access the console session by typing "mstsc.exe /console" from the command line. Instead of connecting to the console, I found myself dropped into a new session on the server. When I started Terminal Services Manager on the remote machine, I saw two sessions, including the console session. When I tried to remote control the console session, I got the message, ""Can't remote control session (ID 0)."

I finally found this Terminal Services Team Blog post with the explanation:

Changes to Remote Administration in Windows Server 2008

There are reasons why /console is no longer needed in Windows Server 2008. Apparently that justifies removing this functionalitiy from RDC 6.1, even when connecting to Windows Server 2003. Worse, the connection succeeds but "silently ignores" the /console switch.

Fortunately, there is a workaround:  use the new /admin switch instead.

Both the application-specific Help file and the Windows XP Help and Support Center still list the missing /console switch and do not mention the /admin switch. Note to Microsoft:  if you're going to "silently" remove functionality, at least update the documentation!

I've been playing with Billy McCafferty's S#arpArchitecture. I decided to strip the Northwind references out of the sample so I could try the framework on my own project. After removing the Northwind-specific files and renaming the remaining files and namespaces to "MyProject," I kept getting this error when I started the application:  "Multiple controllers found with the name 'HomeController'": 

Sometimes I would instead get a message that no HomeController could be found.

The Controllers project contains one (and only one) HomeController class. If I comment out that class, the project starts fine:  the home page appears as expected. There are no other occurrences of "HomeController" anywhere in the solution--so where is the HomeController that is actually running to display the home page?

The Solution 

With the help of Billy McAfferty in the CodePlex forum, I discovered that there were several instances of Northwind-related DLLs and other files hanging about in various bin and Debug folders, especially in the MyProject.Web\bin folder:

MyProject.Controllers\obj\Debug\Northwind.Controllers.csproj.FileListAbsolute.txt
MyProject.Core\obj\Debug\Northwind.Core.csproj.FileListAbsolute.txt
MyProject.Data\obj\Debug\Northwind.Data.csproj.FileListAbsolute.txt
MyProject.Tests\obj\Debug\Northwind.Tests.csproj.FileListAbsolute.txt
MyProject.Web\bin\Northwind.Controllers.dll
MyProject.Web\bin\Northwind.Controllers.pdb
MyProject.Web\bin\Northwind.Core.dll
MyProject.Web\bin\Northwind.Core.pdb
MyProject.Web\bin\Northwind.Data.dll
MyProject.Web\bin\Northwind.Data.pdb
MyProject.Web\bin\Northwind.Web.dll
MyProject.Web\bin\Northwind.Web.pdb
MyProject.Web\obj\Debug\Northwind.Web.csproj.FileListAbsolute.txt
MyProject.Web\obj\Debug\Northwind.Web.dll
MyProject.Web\obj\Debug\Northwind.Web.pdb

I deleted those files, reran the project, and voilà! I'm back to only one HomeController. (I set a breakpoint in my HomeController class just to be sure it is getting there.) Now the default page appears as expected. Just to be safe, I then followed Billy's suggestion to delete all the bin and obj folders and then do a full rebuild:  yep, still works! Thanks Billy.

I attended the San Diego .NET Developer Group on Tuesday. Nick Pearce gave a great presentation on how to use virtual machines as a developer. I jotted down a few notes on topics he and others mentioned.

Virtualization

Some random notes: 

• Nick is moving from Virutal PC to VMWare for the dual-monitor support.
• Remember to turn on hardware virtualization support in your computer's BIOS. Some (like my Thinkpad) disable that by default. 
• A quad-core processor might help performance with multiple virtual machines.
• Use a separate disk drive for a differencing volume to reduce contention.
• You can clone a PC image, but use SysPrep or (XP only) NewSID to fix the SID in the clone.

Source Control

Several products were mentioned:  SourceGear Vault, PerForce, Subversion.

Bug Tracking

More products here:  FogBugz (integrates wtih PerForce), Trac, BugTrac, Mingle. 

I had a customer some time ago who always spelled out my full company name when sending  me email. I finally registered mcbsystems.com so I could receive her emails.

Since then I've implemented Exchange 2003 (under SBS 2003), but apparently I never tested the domain alias until I was setting up Postini. It turns out that Exchange was bouncing messages sent to the domain with a "550 5.7.1 Unable to relay" message.

My situation  pretty much matches the second "class" of SMTP domain in this Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

Setting up SMTP domains for inbound and relay e-mail in Exchange 2000 Server and in Exchange Server 2003

Howver, whereas the article suggests changing the SMTP connector to allow messages to be relayed to this domain, I discovered another option. If I go to Recipient Policies > Default Policy > E-Mail Addresses (Policy) tab, create a policy @mcbsystems.com, and check the box to the left that causes it to auto-generate the address for new Active Directory users, relaying works. If you don't check the box for auto-generating addresses, relaying only works if it is set up in the SMTP connector. I'm not sure what auto-generation of addresses has to do with relaying, but I thought I'd better write this down before I forget it!