Here's a little tip to remember when scheduling tasks on a PC. If you setup a scheduled task to run as a specific user other than yourself (maybe in the case of a server maintenance job) you'll have to give that user some specific permissions so that the task will run unattended. The typical symptom of not having permissions setup correctly is the status "Could not start". A quick fix is to make the user a member of the Administrator's group. You don't want to do that, but it will tell you that the problem is likely permissions if the task runs as an admin. Once you determine it's a permissions problem, here are several things to verify:

1. Make sure the user has Read + Executable permission on the file being executed.
2. Make sure the user has proper permissions to access any resources being read or modified as part of the task's operation. If it's writing a log file to disk, it should have Write permission to the folder and file it's writing to.
3. Make sure the user has permission to execute C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe
4. Make sure the user is listed in the "Log on as a batch job" in the computer's local policies. (And not specifically listed in the "Deny log on as batch job" policy).

Our dev team has just upgraded all our dev machines to shiny new Dell T5400's running Vista. Very nice, especially with 3 flat-panel monitors attached. There's a little bit of excitement in upgrading computers even though it's a bit of a job. There's always a few little programs that get missed when you upgrade to a fresh computer. I noticed today that there wasn't a way to print to a PDF document. I remember having that on my old computer, but not sure how it got there. Anyway, a quick search turned me on to PrimoPDF. It was quick to install and does a great job on my Vista machine. It's also free which is great.

I've linked to a couple cheat sheets in the past (Powershell and CSS), but I've run across a post that lists a bunch for different languages and frameworks. Most of them are available as PDFs. See webtecker.com.

The image is from a VisiBone advertisement. That company sells some great cheat sheets and cheat books.

It's been several months since I've posted (not that anyone has noticed) because we at Mission Research have been heads down putting out a great upgrade to GiftWorks. The GiftWorks 2008 release has three major milestones and we've currently just finished up the second and are on to the third. We'll be done sometime in June if all goes well. The project started in the fall and got off to a slow start, but we're up to speed now and I'm very happy with the progress. Check out my company blog to see details of the release.