Remove recent projects from Visual Studio 2008

To remove projects from the “Recent Projects” list in Visual Studio 2008, open regedit.exe and go to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ProjectMRUList

You will find a number of keys here named “File1″, “File2″, etc. that contain paths to the projects in the “Recent Projects” list. Invalidate the paths of the entries you want to remove. (For instance, you can remove “vcproj” from the path.)

Now open up Visual Studio 2008 and click on one of the projects you want to remove. Visual Studio will detect the incorrect path and ask you whether you want to remove the project from the “Recent Projects” list; click Yes to remove the project from the list.

(Why isn’t this functionality available in VS2008?)

Text truncated to 255 characters when reading from Excel with Jet 4.0 OLEDB

One of those MS vagaries: text from my Excel sheet was truncated to 255 characters. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281517 for the reason. Apparently, the driver guesses the maximum length of a column by looking at the first 8 rows of the Excel sheet. The MS article tells how to change this number, but does not provide a workaround. My (ugly) workaround is: modify the Excel sheet by inserting an extra row at the top that contains more than 255 characters. A subsequent read will identify the column as bigger than 255 characters and read ALL text in the sheet.