Tuesday 30 August 2011

Windows Remote Desktop: The terminal server has exceeded maximum number of allowed connection, mstsc

I kept getting the dreaded 'The terminal server has exceeded maximum number of allowed connection' when attempting to log onto a remote server. I must've forgotten to log out and just clicked close on the mstsc session!

The answer:

You can start a control session to the server and logoff your other connections. Please always use "LogOff" when you leave remote desktop.

Open Command Prompt.
Type: "mstsc /admin".
Remote Desktop Connection will start. Type the computer name or IP address of the computer you want to connect to in the Computer box.
Configure any other desired options, and then click Connect.

Solution from the page at this link

Thursday 11 August 2011

ASP.NET: Scrollable GridView with Fixed Headers: jQuery

Sometimes I find that it's almost impossible to achieve something which should really be incredibly straightforward. Maybe it's because I'm an idiot, or maybe it's because Microsoft have missed a trick.

In this case, I needed to be able to freeze the colum headers of a GridView and make it vertically scrollable. I tried about a dozen different methods, from pure CSS to various JavaScript hacks, and even attempting to do it server-side to try to ensure browser compatibility. I won't link to any of the solutions I tried except one, since only one of them actually worked.

As usual, it was jQuery to the rescue. A simple plugin which you can use to freeze the column headers and add a vertical scrollbar, and with minimal effort. It works as tested in Firefox 3, Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 - though sometimes the column headers are a couple of pixels out of line here or there.

Anyway, there's a nice article describing how to use it on ASP Snippets.

The only drawback I found was that I couldn't really get it to behave properly when the window was resized - but I suspect that was my poor implementation of the plugin rather than a fault with the jQuery code itself.

In conclusion: Microsoft: Get your act together and make this a feature that can be enabled via a property.