Cannot Add HP 4100 Printer - Error 0x00000002
· ☕ 1 min read
It happened after power outage, so our print server randomly turned off. When brought online, the first thing I noticed is that I couldn't print under my Windows 7 Ent x86 workstation. Then, after I removed the printer I could not add it back. Got the error 0x00000002. Log off didn't help.

Outlook Error 0x8004010F - Downloading Offline Address Book
· ☕ 3 min read
It originally started as a minor problem. One of our employees did not get updates for the offline address book (OAB) from the Exchange server. One person was missing from there and it was just one PC that had this issue. Naturally, we tried updating OAB. Got the error 0x8004010F (The operation failed. An object could not be found). Strangely enough, we then tried to update OAB from other PCs and got the same error. However, all those PC had no problem showing that contact on the list.

PowerShell - Print All Odd/Even Lines
· ☕ 1 min read
As a little brainstormer, suppose you have a variable with the following test content. Here is how you can print all odd lines from it. Or, if you want all even lines, change the initial $f value to 1.

VB.NET - Thread Safe Progress Bar
· ☕ 1 min read
Normally, when you are using .NET built-in progress bar in a multi-threaded application without Callback tricks, you are likely to get an exception on value assign. I recently wrote a fairly simple wrapper class, which solves the problem.

SQL Reporting Services - Fix Border Thickness
· ☕ 1 min read
When the report is rendered on the screen in preview mode, it looks okay. However, when it is saved to PDF and/or printed, table borders might have slightly different thickness depending on relative location on the sheet. I believe this issue is related to DPI scaling.

VB.NET - Nullable DateTimePicker
· ☕ 2 min read
One of the popular ways to do this - change format to " " (space) whenever null value is being set and roll it back to the old format on anything else. I have been looking for clean implementation of this approach. In the end I decided to write my own, using source code available on the net. Here is what I came up with.

PowerShell - Get MAC Address Of Any Remote IP
· ☕ 2 min read
Here is a PowerShell one-liner [...] If you need to dynamically resolve a host IP from its name [...] The whole script may look like the following [...] Because it's WMI based, computer can be from any network. But you must have necessary account permissions and firewall rules.