Filter SharePoint List by Today

I needed to filter a task list in SharePoint 2010 so only tasks that are due in under 45 days will be shown. It turns out the easiest way is to just use [Today]+n. I had my filter set to Commited Date < [Today]+45, with no spaces. This will show all items that have a Commited Date in less than 45 days. It works the same with greater than, greater than or equal to, and less than or equal to as well.

I found my answer at the following link:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/745059/filtering-sharepoint-lists-on-a-now-or-today 

Application Icons Missing

I removed a shortcut for MS Visual Studio 2010 and the application icon became a white page. This is obviously not preferred so I struck out to figure out why. Apparently the icon cache database was out of sync and need to be rebuilt.
Open up the command prompt and input the following commands:

• ​taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F
• CD /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local
• DEL IconCache.db /a
• shutdown /r /f /t 00

That should rebuild your IconCache.db and get your icons working properly again.
The steps are also at the following website with a nice .bat for those of you that don't want to do it manually.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/49819-icon-cache-rebuild.html

SharePoint RAG Indicator

If you need to create a RAG indicator, or other type of status indicator, it is a fairly simple process.​ I have found a site that walks through both the 2007 and 2010 setups for creating these indicators. It is not an overwhelmingly difficult task but it does require you to use SharePoint Designer, formulas, and a calculated column. Sarah Haase has a very nice blog about SharePoint which answered the question perfectly.

The steps for this are in the following link:
http://sarahlhaase.wordpress.com/2012/06/06/using-calculated-columns-to-add-color-coding-to-your-sharepoint-lists/

Blank Dropdown Selection in SharePoint

​I needed to have a blank line as the first choice in a field's dropdown in a SharePoint field of type Choice. There is not an OOTB option by any means. Many answers to this use code, but the simplest way is to just use the 0129 ascii character. 0129 is just a blank character which will not get wiped by SharePoint.