I have an HP 2605dn that is a great color laserjet. It comes with a built-in duplexer and works wonderfully under Windows XP, but in Vista (64-bit in my case) the duplexer option is not available. I spent some time digging through many forum posts, none of which were helpful. One said to use the generic PCL6 driver, but that caused the printer to stop printing in color, and only offered a manual style of duplexing. I was beginning to get mad. Then I found this...

http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/bizsupport/getattachment.do?attachmentId=289144&ext=.pdf

The gist of the dcument is this...

• Use the HP Color LaserJet 2605/2605dn/2605dtn PS driver that comes with Vista.
• Right click on the printer and select "Properties" from the context menu.
• Select the Device Settings tab. 
• Scroll down to the Installable Options section and click the setting next to Duplex Unit (for 2-Sided Printing) to switch it from
  Not Installed to Installed.
• Also in the Installed Options change the following Hard Drive options...
     Change "Printer Hard Disk" from Installed to Not Installed 
     Change "Job Storage" from Enabled to Disabled.

Save the changes and the next time you print, the duplexing option will be available and you will still be able to print in color.

Later in the document it says...

     "Download and Install the Printer Drivers from HP.com when they become available"

But as that document is over two years old, HP has not released new drivers for this printer, and Windows 7 is about to debut, I reckon new drivers aren't forthcoming. In fact, I'd bet that they release a new printer with slightly modified firmware and bump the rev so that they can justify abandoning this printer and force us to buy a new one.

Note: The same instructions work for Windows 7 Beta. I am currently running 64-bit Windows 7 (Version 6.1 Build 7000)

I was setting up a Community Server 2008.5 staging site for a client today and needed to modify the hosts file. I went to

C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc

and opened up the hosts file in Notepad. I added the new entry and when I went to save it, I was told that the save failed. At first I thought that the file was write protected, but no. I eventually figured out that I needed to run Notepad as an Administrator.

Right click on the Notepad icon and select "Run as Administrator".

I guess I have a bit of a learning curve with regards to this new UAC in Windows 7 and Server 2008. Microsoft has taken a huge hit due to lax security in the past. We will all have to learn to live with these new restrictions. It actually seems much more Unix-like. I'm sure people will complain and moan about it, but if it makes Windows server more secure, then that's a good thing.

For the past few years, I have been running my blog site on Radwarrior.com. I registered that domain over ten years ago and have been using it ever since. Radwarrior.com is my family's email domain and has housed my personal email for lo these many years.

I created the PhillipBlanton.com in November of 2005 and just recently decided to make it my "Professional" blogging domain. Over the past ten years, I have been posting both technical and inane, stream of consciousness things to radwarrior.com. Now, I will post inane stuff to Radwarrior.com, and professional, techincal stuff to PhillipBlanton.com.

I had a situation on a website I was working on, where users enter their name and email address on a javascript modal dialog, and an email with an attachment is sent to them. The log was showing multiple attempts by the same people. the site administrator presumed that the email send operation was failing and that the user's were attempting it multiple times.

What it actually turned out to be, was that the code that generates the email attachment, then builds and queues the email, was taking about four seconds to complete. That, combined with the postback, was pushing five seconds. the user simply thought they hadn't sufficiently clicked the button, so they were clicking it again, and again befofe the form could close.  

I needed a way to disable the submit button before posting back, but standard client-side javascript to disable the button was preventing the Postback from occurring. Then I found this...

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/ASPNET_Buttons.aspx

The gist of it is you need to add an onclick attribute to the button using the ClientScript.GetPostBackEventReference functionality described here...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.clientscriptmanager.getpostbackeventreference.aspx

And here is what it looks like in a CS page's AttachChildControls method (3rd line is the trick)...

_continueButton = CSControlUtility.Instance().FindControl(this, ContinueButtonID) as Button;

_continueButton.Click += Button_Click;

_continueButton.Attributes.Add("onclick",

    _continueButton.Page.ClientScript.GetPostBackEventReference(_continueButton, "")

    + "; this.value='Sending Email...'; this.disabled = true;");

See following images to see the before click and after click results.

By the way, the form this was used on has server-side validation on the fields. When the user clicks the button with invalid data in the fields, the button says, "Sending Email..." for a flash then the form reloads with the invalid entry messages and a newly enabled button, so everything is fine there too.