44.5 hours later...

That's how long it took to "migrate" from a 300GB RAID 1 array to a 600GB RAID 5 array... not counting the time (probably just as long) that it took to XCOPY the data over to the RAID 1 array in the first place. The nice part is that I was fully able to use the drive and the machine during the process. Now everything is finished and working beautifully!

You are running very low on disk space on C:. To free space on this drive by deleting old or unnecessary files, click here.

I finally broke down and bought the hardware RAID 5 controller card that I've been drooling over for half a year... $620, just for the card, ouch...

The good news is that my storage capacity increases from 300GB to 600GB with redundancy. And I can expand as needed, up to 9 more drives... 3.22 terabytes >:-D

Can't wait for all the components to arrive... :)

Fun with Windows Forms #1

The exception:
System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: InvalidArgument=Value of '-1379311' is not valid for 'length'.
Parameter name: length
at System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox.Select(Int32 start, Int32 length)
at System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox.set_SelectionStart(Int32 value)

The code:
ComboBox cb;
cb.SelectionStart = cb.Text.Length;

The fix:
cb.Select(cb.Text.Length, 0)

Visual Studio Keyboard Tricks

I just recently figured out these keyboard tricks and they are great for working in Visual Studio and SQL Server. I'm using them all the time now!

Ctrl-Left: Move cursor back one "word"
Ctrl-Right: Move cursor forward one "word"
Ctrl-Del: Delete "word" to the right of the cursor
Ctrl-Backspace: Delete "word" to the left of the cursor
*combine with Shift to highlight at the same time

Visual Studio only:
Start/stop recording keyboard macro: Ctrl-Shift-R
Playback keyboard macro: Ctrl-Shift-P
Ctrl-I: "Incremental search" (try it out!)

Old news, right? But I was too lazy to go look this stuff up before now. ;-)
It's almost like working in Emacs again...

I'm especially pleased with this next one: The "snaplines" feature for Visual Studio Windows Forms is great, but it's annoying when it sometimes makes it impossible to resize or reposition a control the way you want to because it's snapping to some other random control on the form. Well, I found out that you can temporarily disable the snaplines by holding down the Alt key while you reposition or resize your control... nice!

Now playing: Andain - Beautiful Things (Josh Gabriel Mix)