Tip - How to display Administrative Tools in Win 7

Recently, I got lost searching Administrative Tools on one of my Win 7 boxes and here's an useful tip from technet to display it on your Start Menu (Just wondering why MS hide it in first place!)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff700232.aspx

How to Add a Second Hard Disk to your Virtual Machine

Here's a nice post which explains the steps to add a second hard disk to your existing VM with screenshots. Good work!

http://linhost.info/2009/08/vmware-add-second-disk-to-a-windows-virtual-machine/comment-page-1/#comment-77619

Dynamics AX 2012 Global Virtual Launch Event (Thursday, September 8th at 9:00am)

Greetings!

As you all Dax 'ians are aware that Dynamics AX 2012 RTM is around the corner, Microsoft has setup a virtual launch online event and it's free!!

You can register this event by visiting http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/ax2012launch/?fbid=PxpIqWXzAN8#register

Njoi

Troubleshooting AOS Service Startup Error Object Server 01 The specified schema name DBO either does not exist

Few days back, one of my AOS Services won't start. In the Event Viewer, I found this error message:


Error 1 - Object Server 01 The database reported session 1 AOS [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]The specified schema name DBO either does not exist


Solution - After some troubleshooting, Found that this was due to the Collation change at SQL Server level which was made sometime back for testing Chinese characters.


Changed the Collation back to the default collation of SQL Server and now AOS Service started.


SQL Collations is a whole new world which I explored a while ago. Will be writing a detailed post soon on that. Watch out this space!

Troubleshooting Dyamics AX Error No Devices found

Issue:

Recently on one of the client machine, this error message "No Devices found" started popping up while the AX Client is loaded.

Solution:  
This is caused by an unregistered ocx file on the client.

To fix this you will need to register the smmPhone.ocx located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics AX\40\Client\Bin folder using regsvr32

Command line is:

regsvr32 C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics AX\40\Client\Bin\smmPhone.ocx

but  had to go to a cmd window, cd to the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics AX\40\Client\Bin folder and then run

regsvr32 .\smmPhone.ocx

Restart the box.

Tip - List all databases on the server EXEC sp_helpdb

Doing a quickie here...

I had a need to extract all the databases into an excel to report on them. Here's a cool SQL which came handy for me:

Open SSMS (SQL Server Mgmt Studio) and fire this sql in the query window:

EXEC sp_helpdb
This will list all the databases name, alongwith some other useful info like size, owner when the db was created, db statust etc. Quite handy. Love SQL :-)