Friday, March 28, 2014

Windows 8: Cleaning up WIFI Profiles and VPN Networks

The other day on my Windows 8 laptop, I noticed a few dozen WIFI connections for places I was unlikely to ever visit again (hotel WIFI connections from business trips and vacations). You would think in 2014 that these would be easy to delete via an administrative GUI.

To delete your superfluous WIFI connections
1) Open a command prompt (CMD from from the Windows 8 main screen)
2) Run the command "netsh wlan show profiles" in the console window:


The output generated by "netsh wlan show profiles" will appear as follows:

Profiles on interface Wi-Fi:

Group policy profiles (read only)
---------------------------------
    <None>

User profiles
-------------
    All User Profile     : San.Diego.Airport.Free.WIFI
    All User Profile     : BW Rockland
    All User Profile     : Travelodge5
    All User Profile     : Holiday Inn On-WiFi 13
    All User Profile     : HolidayInn-1
    All User Profile     : Holiday Inn On-WiFi 10
    All User Profile     : Holiday Inn On-WiFi 14
    All User Profile     : BWLakeLucilleInn

3) Delete each unwanted profile using: netsh wlan delete profile name="ProfileName"
To delete the Wasilla, Alaska, Best Western's WIFI profile the command to execute is:

netsh wlan delete profile name="ProfileName"

Microsoft has a great overview of the netsh command at "Manage wireless network profiles".
 

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Visual Studio Online (cloud based TFS): Deleting another user's Workspaces

It is possible for a Visual Studio Online (cloud based TFS) workspace to exist for a user, even after said user has been removed as a valid VSOL user. The specific VSOL instances this happened under was: https://admiralgracehopper.visualstudio.com/

To remove such an orphaned workspace perform the following steps:

1) Open a Visual Studio command prompt, so that "tf" command can be executed. The full documentation for tf can found for Visual Studio 2013 under Use Team Foundation version control commands.

2) Invoke "tf workspaces" for all workspace owners (hence command-line option /computer:*) and all computers (hence command-line option /owner:*):

tf workspaces /computer:* /owner:* /collection:https://admiralgracehopper.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection

The output for this command will be as follows
Workspace     Owner                Computer      Comment
------------- -------------------- ------------- -------
Contractor-PC Susan Wu             Contractor-PC         
Desktop101    Jan David Narkiewicz Desktop101
LaptopUltra   Jan David Narkiewicz LaptopUltra

The output generated by "tf workspaces" shows a workspace for Susan Wu, the developer who was no longer with the firm.

3) Invoke "tf workspace /delete" to remove the other user's workspace:

tf workspace /delete "Contractor-PC";"Susan Wu" /collection:https://admiralgracehopper.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection

The workspace and username were specified as: <workspace><semi-colon><username>. Double quotes were used to include the space in the username "Susan Wu" and to make sure that the dash in workspace, Contractor-PC, was interpreted correctly by tf.