I don't think we can ever say good by to our good old MS-DOS. My first intimate interaction with Micro Computer(the original name of PC ) was through MS-DOS. Now in the advanced age of computer still I am using DOS, this time as part of one the build scripts. Our continuous integration creates an installer every night(early morning to be exact – this is a cheat, I'll describe it later). We want to keep them for 2 weeks and delete afterwards. Now to do this I can create a simple .net console app, which will be more efficient in error handling etc. But I like to do it in the good old way :).

Found a command line utility –ForFiles- comes with WinXP command line.

(If you don't have installed by default – in most of the case no- you can download it from the MS FTP server. You may want to place it to C:\WINDOWS\system32 or update the PATH variable accordingly)

-p : path to search for
-s : include subdirectories
-m : search mask (*.msi files here)
-d : files older than days (14 in my case), you can use dates instead
-c : the command to execute on the files

also checkout the help for 'forfiles'. If you have forgotten how to do it, its forfiles/?... uh it doesn't work ? simply type forfiles :)

The following variables can be used in Command : (@path is already used in the above example)
@FILE, @FNAME_WITHOUT_EXT, @EXT, @PATH, @RELPATH, @ISDIR, @FSIZE, @FDATE, @FTIME

hope this helps...

edit

found a nice website with WinXP command lines

How to hard reset HTC Desire to factory setting, some call it factory reset.

I have an HTC Desire Z, I had to hard reset the phone couple of times because of all junk apps I install.

Steps to hard reset, may be helpful for you…

HARD RESET WILL WIPE ALL YOUR PERSONAL DATA, so please do a backup before you start

Turn off your phone,
1. With the phone turned off, press and hold the VOLUME DOWN button, and then briefly press the POWER button.
2. Wait for the screen with the three Android images to appear, and then release the VOLUME DOWN button..
3. Press VOLUME DOWN to select CLEAR STORAGE, and then press POWER.
4. Press VOLUME UP to start the factory reset.

I think this is different from what you do thorugh the ‘factory reset’ menu option in setting. ( I am not sure though)

My colleague suggested me a nice UI mock-up tool recently. Balsamiq has a free web version with some limitation, its not very expensive if you want to buy. I like the product though, we can say bye bye to MS paint for UI mock-up also its a nice idea they have built in controls for common windows controls.

-Rujith

I am sure that most you have read this in the MSDN documentation, it appears almost everywhere. Recently while brainstorming about a deadlock issue in our project someone raised this topic. ‘Public static (Shared in Visual Basic) members of this type are thread safe. Any instance members are not guaranteed to be thread safe’, and claimed that all Framework type static instances are thread safe.

My opinion is this is bit misleading. This doesn't mean that all type in .NET framework are thread safe in static instance, nor that all static instance of any type is thread safe. If you think for a sec, nothing is thread safe by default, the author has to make a type thread safe, in this case MS has taken the time to verify that they are thread safe (which is very easy if they don't touch shared data). So it is your responsibility to make your class/type is thread safe.

I am sure MS is aware of this confusing statement. In old days it used to be only the two sentences in documentation (as above), but now you can see they are elaborating it bit more. Check here documentation for Array

And check this out, Thread Safety for TaskFactory says,

All public and protected members of TaskFactory are thread-safe and may be used concurrently from multiple threads

Hope that helps.

Rujith

I recently found a nice free icon editor called IconFX.  Its really cool and very lightweight, you can simply use the exe no need to install. That’s surprise in this world when you have install (and sometimes reboot ) every single piece of software isn't it ?

Try it out… http://icofx.ro/

Nine Options for Managing Persistent User State in Your ASP.NET Application… one of the basic things to learn when you start ASP.NET training… :) I am forgetting simple things…

so the methods are

1. Application
2. Cookies
3. Form Post / Hidden Form Field
4. Query String
5. Session
6. New State Containers in ASP.NET
7. Cache
8. Context
9. ViewState
10. Web.config and Machine.config Files
11. Profile (ASP.NET 2.0) ??

more details are on MSDN

Found this interesting post here…

I am sure all of us (s/w fellows) must have come across so called ‘distributed team’… nice point to note…

-Rujith

Hope everyone worked on DOS (NOT Denial Of Service, its Disk Operating System :)) remember the command ’Cd\’. That’s something which everyone used so frequently. Now in Windows PowerShell you have to use “Cd \” (notice the space between d and slash), come on Powershell guys does this change really required ?? I am sure its a bad decision making.

-Rujith

Its true the modern monitors don't need it, but we do :)... check out some cool screensaver here..

http://www.dudeworldorder.com/2009/04/16-awesome-screensavers/

Enthalpy, joules per kilogram(J/Kg), psi, Kelvin, viscosity ... remember this ?

Yes I am back to these now, I think the last time I used these words was when I was in college. You will be wondering what happened to this fellow uh...

I am currently working for a Oilfield services corporation. I am learning about well(the one which gives oil not water), drilling, seabed etc.. these are very exciting things. I started remembering about my college days, mathematics was fun isn't it..even though I am a physics graduate I loved mathematics. Maths in Physics was fun(in a way), you start from a small equation and then you expand it expand it and it take few pages of your notebook and finally it becomes a very small equation. I remember once my professor after one hour of problem solving finally came to e=mc². Its fun isn't it..

yeah instead of taking it as fun, I would have studied then now I would have become some scientists. Like the guys sitting in my company :(...

Cheers
Rujith