Remote desktop for Vista (and if you download the update for XP) has a great feature, it allows you to save the username/password combination so you don't have to type it in all the time. When I put the update for XP on, I was doing work for one of the large banks in the country and worried about what happens if they steal my laptop. If they can get in, they just need to open remote desktop to access various systems :(

Well Windows Server 2008 finally fixes this, but enforcing a rule which denies saved passwords. Meaning if you save or not, you have to retype.

Another great feature in 2008 is the ability to secure the remote desktop to use network level authentication, which means it is even more secure than normal. With the only requirement on the client being you have to run Vista.

Previously I blogged about the IFD tool for Microsoft CRM 4.0, I even post the beta I had recieved because it seems PSS was not getting it out in an easy way. Well now (finally) the offical tool is out! Get it and details from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948779

NOTE: This was developed in March 2008 and the calculations are no longer accurate. They are close but not exactly right.

Update 11 August 2011: Want this as an app for your smartphone? Click here

A personal annoyance at the moment is the use of the term AA rates. It seems companies love to tell employees they pay at AA rates or charge customers at AA Rates. However due to a recent annoying experence I decided to read up on this, and to findout what the AA rate actually is.

Well imagine my surprise when I didn't find one magic overall AA rate! What I did find is there is a AA rate per vehicle, so how you get one rate is beyond me (I guess you could take the avg value of everyone in the company, but that sounds like too much work for admin/financial staff who need to update it each time someone joins/leaves).

Anyway I decided to take that and some of the Excel skills I have been taught recently and build a nice Excel speadsheet (2007 version) which works it out for you (download below). You can get the details on the rules and the fuel price (which you will need) from the AA site.

(This is a repost of the content which was previously available on the IW community site)

At Tech·Ed Africa 2006, myself and Bruce Nicholson did a presentation on integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0. While the slides were available for print, and on the event DVD, the code samples were not. No idea why since they were all submitted at the same time but that's life. So now for the first time here are the slides and all the code samples available for download!!

(This is a repost of the content which was previously available on the IW community site)

Here is an interesting effect which I was solved recently, namely when an item in MSCRM was created the assign event (both callout and workflow) would fire twice. This was very odd and great lengths were taken to track it down, using the MSCRM trace tool, various tests etc… But since this was one instance of the problem which could not be replicated at other sites it was eventually shelved until more important issues were resolved.

This issue only occurred during creations from outside sources (namely my code) and didn't happen if you created the item in the MSCRM interface. But this was normal code where I created the item, set the properties and passed it to the Create method. Nothing fancy here. The issue was that I couldn't see the trees because of the forest, namely I was setting the ownerid parameter as one of the parameters.

What this was doing internally was causing the assign to fire when the item was created and then to cause a second assign to fire to handle the ownerid. Removing that one line of code fixed the issue up immediately.

Well the Information Worker site got it's much anticipated face lift recently. It really looks amazing now and is more a proper community site than a blog site for a select few. Well done to everyone involved.

It does mean that my old content is gone, but do not fear I am making plans to get it back (either a backup or the WayBackMachine), so there will be some reposting on this site for the next little bit.

In MSCRM 4.0 you may get the following error when trying to track an email:

The text entered exceeds the maximum length

This is caused because the message ID is too long for the field, has nothing to do with the email itself (message is confusing cause it says text entered, but you not actually entering it). To solve it do the following:

• Open the IE CRM Client.
• Open Settings
• Select Customisation from the left menu and open the E-Mail  entity.
• Open Attributes and Open the messageid attribute
• You should see a text box named Maximum Length with the value 100 in it. Increase this value to 200.
• Click Save and Close
• Click Save and Close
• Click More Actions à Publish All Customisations
• Click Start Menu à Run and type iisreset click Run

Thanks to Oli Ward on the PSS at Microsoft for figuring this one out.

Out of the same interview as before, comes another article. I like this one more, as it feels less sales like (for those who know me, know I am not a sales person) and more like the actual interview was.

Ages ago I did an interview around the Rezonance product brand I work on. It was so long back I had forgotten about it. Well the interview appeared online this weekend. Thanks to Carey for the heads up.

Update 26 August 2010: A new and better version of this Excel file has been made available. Please go to South African ID Number Checker in Excel version 2 to get it.

Update 11 August 2011: Want this as an app for your smartphone? Click here

A few days back I wanted to validate a list of ID numbers, and previously I have done the basics (length, date etc...) but I decided to do the full thing this time. So I search for the rules and found this post, which explains it nicely and contains some C# code. However for me C# didn't cut it as I wanted to process an Excel spreadsheet. So I whipped together a nice one which does the following checks:

• Length
• Valid Date
• Date is in the past
• Gender Flag
• Nationality Flag
• Check Bit

I've hidden the calculation cells so you can just unhide if you want to see the calculations. When I ran my list through it the failures came in two forms, obvious failures (things like 1000000000000) or check bit failures. Since I don't know which are real/valid in my list I am not sure if the check bit is 100%, but it did work fine for real ones I put in myself.
Anyway you can grab it below in the attachments section (You can grab the version 2 from the link above).

24 Jan 2010: I have disabled comments on this post as I am getting a lot of people asking me about who ID numbers belong to, how to track people based on ID's or what someones ID is. None of those I can answer as I do not work for the govt, police etc... If you have questions on the technical aspects of ID numbers please contact me using the contact form option.