As promised earlier, I’ve created a small utility which updates currency exchange rates for currencies used by Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 server. It’s fast, reliable and can be run in unattended mode, so you can set it once and forget about it.

A bit about Microsoft Dynamics CRM first

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is the most advanced CRM system created so far. It allows you to keep track on your customers, partners and rivals and monitor relations in real time. So you can create marketing campaign for all your customers in Denmark with turnover higher than 200 000 euro and who’s main industry is Finance. And send them personalized proposal. And each of that customers will reply to manager, assigned to that customer. And you will track the success of that action in real time, being able to test your genius as CEO. Well, not only that. More...

I’ve created a small sample project for Mondor's Captcha (see the full project page here). As some people are asking at the forum about how to implement it in ASP.NET project, I decided to make a quick sample for both development environment and production IIS.

MS CAPTCHA is a free component for ASP.NET which implements “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” – an image which “only people” could read. In case of Mondor’s CAPTCHA, it also contains unique feature called “Arithmetic”, which displays simple formula, so even if bot will be able to read “2 + 2”, it will type “2+2” as an answer, while there should be 4.

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Well, yet another useful command line utility. This one is for system administrators in need to run some command on behalf of another user.

Why bother, if there is a command in Windows, called runas? Well, mainly because it doesn’t accept the password as command line parameter, and also because I wanted to add more features to such simple process.

This is the help text you get when running this program without parameters:

Syntax: executeas.exe /u:UserName /p:Password /x:Priority /d:Domain /a:Affinity /quiet /hide /noprofile /wait /t:60 [program name]
Where t is a timeout in seconds to wait for program completion.
The only required parameter is program name. You can place command line arguments after the program name.

As you can understand, UserName is the user name of target user without the domain name,
Password is his password,
Priority is the priority at which you want this program to be executed (1 – idle, 2 – below normal, 3 – normal, 4 – above normal, 5 – high),
Domain is the domain part of the user name, if needed,
Affinity is how many CPU cores you’d like to use,
Quiet won’t produce any output,
Hide will hide the target program, so it will not be displayed to user,
NoProfile means that profile of target user won’t be loaded,
Wait will wait until the target program will be completed – useful when running from batch file.

So, here it is and have fun!

As  always, .net framework is required for this program to run. This time it’s .net 3.5, which is installed by default on Windows 7 and is available as feature on Windows Server 2008.

ExecuteAs.zip (3.99 kb)

Do you remember such thing as Outlook Express? A lightweight e-mail client from Microsoft which was the part of operating system since the stone age. It was separated from Windows for good, so unlike in Windows XP, we don’t have to cut it from the distribution DVD anymore. However, once separating some applications from the system, Microsoft added a few more tools to the Live family.

One of them is the one I am using at this particular moment – Windows Live Writer. The thing looks like a Microsoft Office 2010 product, something similar to FrontPage, but it’s about blogging. Whatever platform you are using for your blog, it can connect to it and you can use this wonderful editor without ever having to log into your blog. Styles, working with resources - everything is here. And it’s free.

Another one is irreplaceable for me and it is called Live Mesh. Once you’ve got your free 5Gb space at Windows Live, called SkyDrive, you can synchronize folders between your multiple computers. Like, for example, between home and work machine, so you can make sure that two folders on these machines are equal. Works perfectly for source code sharing for my notebooks and desktop, as having multiple versions of hundreds of files is a pain.
Another feature of Live Mesh is remote desktop, which works also through proxy and is just great when you want to log into your home computer but don’t want to set the remote desktop NAT rules. At some point it is more secure, as you won’t forget to switch off your rules later.

I know how hard it is to find a gem in a pile of software and services, so if you have a problem that any of these two programs solve, try them out!