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ShowMyPC.com – Instant Desktop Sharing and Access Remote PC Free

I just found out about ShowMyPC.  I had to call into support for one of our app servers at work and  the tech used this software to remotely control my machine.

That’s no big deal.  I’m sure most of us have done this.  What got me was that this was totally free.

Since I don’t really consult anymore 90% of my remote troubleshooting calls are from customers like "wife", "mom" or "mother-in-law".  🙂 I don’t like the idea of spending a monthly subscription fee so that I can help troubleshoot my family and friends.

So my current strategy is I have hamachi installed on all my personal machines and those of my families.  I then use RealVNC to jump in whenever they need me.  It’s been working great.  however, the setup is a pain, especially if the user needs help right away.

The next time I’ll be trying ShowMyPC.  As the website says it’s a free alternative to GoToMyPC and such. 

To use it just go to their website.  For your users they click on the top link:

link

You simply click on the 2nd link (it’s really just the same target):

link2

Once you click Run you get the following dialog:

dialog

Your user clicks the Show My PC Now button and a random password is generated. They tell you this password over the phone.

You click the View a Remote PC button, type in the password, and that’s it!

This is a great tool for quickly helping out simple problems and impromptu calls.

Of course they do have premium features that they charge for, such as branding, using your own secure SSH server, etc.  But for helping out with a quick and dirty question like "my printer isn’t working" this is great.

I still like my hamachi setup for when I need to get into a computer that is unattended or for more advanced features.  I’m sure others of you have similar setups with your program of choice.  But maybe the next time your 4th cousin who doesn’t know how to use the digital camera your 3rd cousin just got them, you can start up ShowMyPC and get them up and running.

ShowMyPC.com – Instant Desktop Sharing and Access Remote PC Free

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Interviews on TechZulu

I just found out about TechZulu because Geoffrey Emery is involved.  He ended up interviewing a lot of us at the SQL 2008 Firestarter event in Irvine, CA. 

 Swing on by as they have a lot of great interviews from developers and other contributers to technology.

I know that James Johson is really pulling for them to video our IE .Net User Group MVP event in July.  So, Geoffrey, Efren and the rest, come on and do it! 🙂

 Here’s a list of interviews from the Firestarter event (in no particular order – well maybe all except mine):

Matt Penner (your’s truly)
James Johnson (IE .Net UG President)
Lynn Langit (MS Developer Evangelist)
Joey Snow (IT Pro Evangelist)
Stephen Rose (MS MVP)

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Searching for a past committed file in SVN

Recently a colleague asked me how to search for a file in SVN. Apparently someone on the team had deleted it and then committed the project. Unfortunately no one knew who or when and it was now causing a problem.

If you use TortoiseSVN there is a really great way to get a lot of information on your revisions, including searching for files.

Simply right-click on the project folder (not the repository folder), go to the TortoiseSVN menu and click Show Log.

ShowLog

This will bring up a log browser for every revision on the project. You can select a revision in the top pane, see the log messages in the middle pane and all files modified for that particular revision in the bottom pane.

What’s even better is on the top right is a search textbox.

Search

My friend typed the name of the file in the textbox and voila! Any revision that had an action on that file showed up. They were able to easily find out exactly when the file was deleted and who deleted it.

<promotion author:self type:shameless>

I’ll be doing a quick intro on using SVN and TortoiseSVN at the IE .Net User’s Group in Riverside on July 8th. If you’ve ever wondered about using SVN or version control in general stop on by!

</promotion>
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Isaac @ MSDN : Our Upcoming Builder API

This is pretty sweet.  When Geoffrey Emery and I presented at the Microsoft SQL 2008 Fire Starter in Irvine we showed a lot of examples of viewing SQL 2008 spatial data in Microsoft Virtual Earth.  We did this primarily by grabbing the GML output from SQL 2008 and converting it to a GeoRSS feed, which Virtual Earth reads natively.

Using the Builder API we could write a routine to output directly in GeoRSS.

I’ll see if I can play with this later and give an example.

SQL 2008 is really starting to come together and it’s pretty exciting.

Isaac @ MSDN : Our Upcoming Builder API