Microsoft Log Parser is a great tool when it comes to parse your IIS Log files. But probably you will need something more usable than a command line program: here comes the excellent tool provided by Lizard Labs: Log Parser Lizard GUI (free edition).

With this program you can query you IIS Log using a SQL-Like syntax and export your results into excel. Using Log Parser you can obtain almost any kind of information that is incapsulated into your IIS's logs. For example if you want to know, how many Http Requests (Hits) did a particular site on your web server gets  since a certain date you can run:

SELECT  date as Data, cs-username as Utente, cs-uri-stem as Url, COUNT(cs-uri-stem) as Hits
FROM 'c:\YOUR_IIS_LOG_FOLDER\ex*.log'
WHERE (cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.jpg' AND
 cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.gif'  AND
 cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.css' AND
 cs-uri-stem NOT LIKE '%.js'  AND
 cs-username  <> null AND
 cs-uri-stem LIKE '%/YOURSITE/YOURFOLDER/%'  AND
 date >= '2009-01-01'

)
GROUP BY Data , Utente, cs-uri-stem
ORDER BY Data, Utente, Hits

As you can see, i have excluded different file types extensions, because i'm not interested in this kind of files. If you are intersted in tracking only aspx file extensions, you should modify the query in appropriate way.

Important searcheble IIS log fields are described into this table:

Table 1: IIS Log Fields

If you need more informations about Log Parsers capabilites, consider visiting: http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1712 

XSane is a graphical scanning frontend that makes easy to use you scanner. But when i lauched XSane for the first time under my Debian Lenny enviroment, XSane reported:

Failed to open device `v4l:/dev/video0': Invalid argument

To prevent this error, you should comment out the “/dev/video0″ line in /etc/sane.d/v4l.conf. Now you should be able attach your USB scanner and launch correctly the program.
But what happens if XSane says that no scanner is found? Follow these steps that helped me to solve the problem:ù

1. Ensure the that libsane-extras package is insalled in your machine
2. Try to run XSane as root. If it work, and finds your scanner, you should fix the permeission sets on your scanner device.
3. Find out which bus your usb scanner resides on, this is easily done with the lsusb command:
   
   debian:/home/myo# lsusb
   Bus 008 Device 004: ID 054c:0377 Sony Corp.
   Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
   Bus 007 Device 002: ID 05ca:183d Ricoh Co., Ltd
   Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
   Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
   Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
   Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
   Bus 003 Device 007: ID 04b8:010b Seiko Epson Corp. Perfection 1240
   Bus 003 Device 006: ID 046d:c01d Logitech, Inc. MX510 Optical Mouse
   Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
   Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
   Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
   
   You can see the scanner resides on Bus 003 and is the 007 device in this case.
   Change the permissions using:
   debian:/home/myo# chmod a+w /dev/bus/usb/003/007 .  Replace the bus and the devices numbers with yours.

SharePoint 2007 is missing a feature that lets you export all Users that belong to a particular group into a Excel compatibile file format. What happens if someone asks you: "May I have a list of all users that belongs to a particular group?". Would be nice to have a simple Form Application that saves the list provinding for each user informations like the domain name, the full name and the email?

With just few lines of code you can accomplish that or if you prefer, you can download my little project: SharePoint Group Users Info which does exactly this job:

Once you have insered your SharePoint's site url, click the Get Groups button. Select the group you wish to export and press Get Users Info. A Save File Dialog will pop up, asking you where would you save your CVS file. Open it with Excel and you are done!

Download Visual Studio 2008 Project: SharePointGroupUsersInfo.rar (70.63 kb)

The SQL Full Text Catalog, provides a fast search of you products into you DashCommerce's  database. But what happens if you mess up the catalog? You will receive errors like

A critical error has occurred: Cannot drop full-text catalog 'dashCommerce_Catalog' because it contains a full-text index

and you will not able to drop the catalog

Cannot drop full-text catalog 'dashCommerce_Catalog' because it contains a full-text index.

Unless you follow the steps illustrated below.

Connect to you DashCommerce's database,  and launch:

SELECT name, ftcatid FROM sysobjects WHERE ftcatid > 0
GO

This will return the table where the Full Text Catalg is use:

EXEC sp_fulltext_database 'enable'
GO
CREATE FULLTEXT CATALOG dashCommerce_Catalog
GO

CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX ON [dbo].[dashCommerce_Store_Product] KEY INDEX [PK_dashCommerce_Products] ON [dashCommerce_Catalog] WITH CHANGE_TRACKING AUTO
GO

ALTER FULLTEXT INDEX ON [dbo].[dashCommerce_Store_Product] ADD ([Name] LANGUAGE 1033)
GO
ALTER FULLTEXT INDEX ON [dbo].[dashCommerce_Store_Product] ADD (ShortDescription LANGUAGE 1033)
GO
ALTER FULLTEXT INDEX ON [dbo].[dashCommerce_Store_Product] ADD (BaseSku LANGUAGE 1033)
GO

There are different solutions on the web that describes how to implement a watermark over an asp.net TextBox. The solution I still prefer is just using JavaScript with  of asp.net's parser capabilities:

Into your ASPX markup page, try the solution posted below. solution: