I’ve been having problems with a SanDisk Ultra II compact flash card and thought I lost a handful of images that I took over the weekend.  Thanks to some help from the DPReview forums, I was pointed to the ArtPlus Digital Photo Recovery application.  It’s a nifty little free application that can recover photos from a corrupt memory card and did a pretty good job for me, even after I had reformatted my compact flash card!

How cool is this?  Red-Gate Software has a free plug-in for Query Analyzer that gives you Intellisense® support!  Click here to get it.

Should you ever find yourself needing to write CAML queries (XML queries) against a SharePoint list, the U2U CAML tool is quite helpful. U2U member Patrick Tisseghem has a nice blog post on how to use the tool which can be downloaded form their web site.

One thing to note is that the tool wraps the query XML nodes within a <Query></Query> node.  You’ll want to delete that node in your .NET code.  As a result, your CAML query might look something like this: 

Dim strQueryDate as String = Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPUtility.CreateISO8601DateTimeFromSystemDateTime(CDate(“05/05/2006”))

Dim strQuery as String = “<Where><Geq><FieldRef Name=””Created”” /><Value Type=””DateTime””>{0}</Value></Geq></Where>”, strQueryDate)

Note the goofy CreateISO8601DateTimeFromSystemDateTime method that is used for the date… CAML uses an ISO8601 date format so you must use this method if you want to do date comparisons.

For those of you who use Visio to due your database modeling, you might have run across the slight problem of not being able to get rid of the auto-generated foreign-keys in your tables (assuming you might have deleted and recreated a relation to the same table.)  If you try to generate a database from your model, you’ll find that the foreign keys that you thought you deleted still exist somewhere in ‘limbo’ and as a result, the error checking in Visio goes crazy.

So, how do you get rid of these ‘phantom foreign keys/relationships’?  Well, I found no solutions from Microsoft’s web site, but I did find some work-arounds from a few blog posts.  Here are two methods that seem to work:

Copy Data Structure into a New File

1. Create a new database model diagram
2. Select all of the items in your existing diagram and click Ctrl+C (Copy)
3. Paste the entire diagram into your new diagram.  The “phantom” foreign keys will not be copied.

View (and Delete) Related Tables

1. Right-click on the table with the problem
2. Select "Show related tables" and you should get the "phantom relationship" back
3. Select the relationship and delete it

I recently had to writing a proposal for a web site design RFP which I had never done before.  The company I work for doesn’t typically respond to RFPs and we typically do development work, but this time we made an exception.

It was quite the learning experience to write the proposal and quite difficult because there were so many unknowns, despite the details of the RFP.  In addition, since the company I work for really isn’t a design firm, we weren’t sure what the ‘other guys’ would propose.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get the work, but I’m still curious as to how other companies price web site design jobs.  The design company Blue Flavor has published the blog entry Pricing a Project which is a little inside-look at how they price projects and is very insightful.

Note to self: Bookmark this link! MSDN: 101 Samples for Visual Studio 2005