ACS : Powershell commands with Appfabriclabs / Proxy

The ACS team have just announced a set of Powershell commands for ACS.

See here.

Two small problems - they work for ACS but not for Appfabriclabs and ,secondly, they don't work for people who have to work behind a proxy.

Some quick changes to the provided VS project should have you running in no time.

For Appfabriclabs:

In Constants.cs

//public const string AcsHostName = "accesscontrol.windows.net";
public const string AcsHostName = "accesscontrol.appfabriclabs.com";

For the proxy:

In ServiceManagementWrapper.cs - just add the proxy code below.

private string GetTokenFromACS()
{
    var client = new WebClient();

    WebProxy proxy = new WebProxy("1.2.3.4", 1234);
            
    proxy.BypassProxyOnLocal = true;
    proxy.UseDefaultCredentials = true;
          
    client.Proxy = proxy;

    client.BaseAddress = string.Format("https://{0}.{1}", this.serviceNamespace,
    Constants.AcsHostName);

    ...
}

Then rerun the startHere.cmd to update and install the plugin.

Enjoy!

Misc : To celebrate the 250th post!

Yup, folks, this is the 250th post (on Wednesday, 11th May 2011).

The very first one was on Wednesday, March 23, 2005 entitled "SQL CE : Merge Replication". (When the world was young and I still did embedded work and Windows CE was cool bananas!).

Enjoy!

Powerpoint : Using the pen

Came across a neat trick in Powerpoint 2010.

If you hit F5 to run your presentation, you can then right-click on the slide:

Pointer Options / Pen

and then draw some annotations or arrows or whatever to help explain. You can also use this to highlight various pieces of text on the fly. Naturally, you can change the pen colour.

When you finish the deck, you will be asked if you want to keep the annotations.

However, if you start with a blank slide, you can use this to physically draw Powerpoint slides that are only pictures, arrows etc. in freehand.

Build up the blank slides, say "Yes" to keep annotations and voila - a freehand presentation.

There are keyboard shortcuts e.g. Ctrl P for the Pen, Ctrl E to Erase, Ctrl M to show / hide the markup etc.

There's a full list here.

Enjoy!