Categories
Geeky/Programming

Tools You Should Use: Tasklist

Day to day we all use many different systems and tools. Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Twitter, Facebook, Powershell, Visual Studio, Sublime Text, iTunes, and the list goes on and on. There are so many cool utilities and tools out there, and many people aren’t aware of the majority of them, but at one point or another, they could benefit from using them..

The first tool/utility I’d like to tell you about is: tasklist (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb491010.aspx)

tasklist is a cmd line utility built into windows that you can use to see running processes. With any utility, run “tasklist /?” to see options. You can
run it with /S and pass in a remote system name, pretty cool. Also authenticated using /U and /P. You can see many other options as well. Format, Verbose, etc.

You can use this to get the running processes on a remote system. Want an easy way to see who might be remoted (RDP) into a machine?

tasklist /s COMPUTERNAME /v /FI "ImageName eq Explorer.exe"

Pretty cool huh? Just think of the other possibilities. Log the running tasks to a csv and track over time with memory usage. Check remotely for a process running. tasklist should be able to help. And used in conjunction with other tools, you can do a lot of remote admin work.

I’m hoping to highlight on more utilities and turn those posts into a series, so stay tuned.

Categories
Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools

One nice thing released for VS2010 recently is the “Productivity Power Tools”. If you are using VS2010 I would recommend installing it.

Once installed, you can see the options under Tools->Options->Productivity Power Tools

 

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One feature I really like is the “Fix Mixed Tabs” feature.

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When you open a code file it will analyze and tell you if need to “Tabify” – convert spaces to tabs, the old developers argument of tabs vs spaces solved. BTW, they should be tabs!

Check out the tools and learn the other features, there are some good things in there to help your code and get around in VS2010.

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Continuous Integration and TFS: Team Build Screen

 

If you are running TFS and you want to show the status of your builds on an LCD, check out this sweet app – Team Build Screen – on CodePlex (http://teambuildscreen.codeplex.com/)

 

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We just recently set this up outside my office and it is a great addition in letting us know the status of our builds, as they happen, and if anything breaks the build, etc. Great way to get visibility to everyone on the team and everyone walking by.

Categories
Business Intelligence Product Reviews

Redgate SQL Search – Free Download

I have always wanted a good way to search all the db’s on a server, find procs, views, whatever that have something in their DDL so i could do what I want with it. There are ways using DMV’s or other things in SQL Server, but it just becomes a pain.

Then came along SQL Search (http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Search/index.htm) – from Redgate. And it is free! Works like a charm. It eliminates the need to fire up some query and change what you are looking for. It works well. Check it out the next time you are trying to find every object that has “whatever” in its T-SQL DDL.