Scott's code and other ponderings... » Utilities

FileTreeView source (1.0.0.0)

Scott Leckie — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:01:24 +0000

I had promised to post this to codeproject, but I wanted that article to be sooooooooooooooooooooo perfect… I spent days and weeks and months and years writing the article but never got round to finishing it.

In the meantime, a number of people have asked for the source to FileTreeView and, as promised, here it is!

http://www.scottleckie.com/wp-content/uploads/FileTreeView.zip

I'm an open kinda guy so if you have any suggestions or improvements, please add a comment, or email me, and I'll do my best to incorporate [...]

FileTreeView – a SequioaView-like Application

Scott Leckie — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:24:00 +0000

I've long been a huge fan of the SequoiaView application released by Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, which displays disk utilization in a beautiful squarified cushion treemap format. This was released in 2002 and does a great job of showing exactly what's eating the space on your disk, but it has one major drawback; if you point it at a 2TB volume with a million files, but you only want to see what's taking the space in a small corner of the disk, it reads the entire volume before displaying what you originally asked it to. So, I decided to write a C# alternative to SequoiaView, partly to help us find the big files in specific folders really quickly, and partly just as [...]

Microsoft Data Visualization Components on Windows 7

Scott Leckie — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:33:00 +0000

I’ve been playing around with the Data Visualization Components recently (looking to incorporate the TreeMap control with a SequioaView-a-like disk space analyser) but ran into problems getting the toolkit installed on Windows 7 RC1. Running the setup from the official page at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/dda33e92-f0e8-4961-baaa-98160a006c27/default.aspx gets stuck looking for .Net Framework 1.1.4322;

Of course, being Windows 7, .Net 3.5 is already installed which should include .Net 1.1 but it looks like the Components installer is hopelessly confused. I couldn’t get the installer to believe we had something better than 1.1 already installed and I didn’t want to try and hack .Net 1.1 on top of Windows 7.

So, all I really needed were the “bunch of files” that come in the Component setup so [...]

Auditing access to a file on Vista

Scott Leckie — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 16:22:00 +0000

Every so often, when I open Outlook, it tells me that my PST file was not closed properly and it’s being checked for errors. It seems from a spot of googling that this isn’t an Outlook problem as such, more that another app opened my PST and did not close it properly.

Task Manager or Anvir Task Manager (excellent app) shows that, whoever the culprit is, it’s not running the next time I start Outlook. My suspicions are firmly on Skype, especially as there are a ton of postings on it keeping the PST open, but I’ve checked the obvious settings and they don’t seem to be the culprit.

Right, I thought, let’s turn on file auditing and I can see which process [...]

Anti Virus…

Scott Leckie — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:33:00 +0000

Greetings from Hamburg, Germany…Over here on business; meeting tomorrow and flying back on Friday.

The good news? I flew from Edinburgh (EDI) to Heathrow (LHR) T5 and from there to Hamburg but, because I still have a BA gold card I got to visit the “First Lounge” for the (ahem) first time. All in all, it was a similar experience to the old T4 First experience but they have a separate area for the champagne bar. And so, this morning, I was relaxing with the Times (GoBama being very appropriate) and some canadian bacon, some scrambled eggs and a glass of Krug.

Where was I? Oh yeah; anti virus products…A while ago (two years and five days to be exact) I bought a [...]

Backing up VMs

Scott Leckie — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:34:00 +0000

A lot of my production systems (web, email, dev) are now running on VMs.

I’ve been worried about my belts and braces approach to these VMs and I have now combined a mix of scripting (DOS) and syncing (SyncToy 2.0) to ensure that I have local copies of the VMs that I can restore at a few moments notice.

I’m still working on a few points, most notably the unpredictable nature of PLink, and will post a how [...]

Finding duplicate files

Scott Leckie — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:18:00 +0000

At work we have a problem. We’ve got an expensive Storage Area Network (SAN) which isn’t expensive purely because of the servers and disks, but also because we back up a lot of that data every single night.Now, imagine that (like us) you are an ISV. So, we have a nightly build which results in a code base of around 900MB. Some of these make it to testing. Some of these make it to release candidate and some of these actually become a release.Our main file server has it’s storage on the SAN so even taking into account the fact that most releases never hit the customers, we have issues with duplicate files on the server /SAN. Consider an overnight build…

We [...]