Sample source for Visual Studio 2005

What better than having sample source from the very company who brought us Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET 2.0 Framework? Check out the 101 Samples for Visual Studio 2005.

Technorati Tags: .NET, ASP.NET 2.0, C#, CLR, Visual Studio 2005

Take web apps offline for maintenance

I found a very interesting entry at ScottGu's Blog regarding maintenance on ASP.NET 2.0 web applications. It basically consists of adding a file named asp_offline.htm to the root directory of your web application and ASP.NET 2.0 will shut down the app.

read more

Technorati Tags: ASP.NET 2.0

SQL Server 2005 Express

I was playing around with SQL Server Express 2005 at work today. We are thinking about using it for the next release of one of our products. I moved my database over and attached it to the server and started working in Visual Studio 2005.

When I finished creating a CLR based stored procedure, on deployment, I got an error about “Incorrect syntax near 'EXTERNAL'”. I did some searching and finally found that you have to update the compatibility index on your database when moving from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005. The command to do this is ...

Exec sp_dbcmptlevel 'DatabaseName', '90'

Even after setting the compatibility index, I was still unable to execute my stored procedure, because CLR Integration was not enabled for SQL Server 2005 Express. I had to use the SQL Server Surface Area Configuration tool to enable the CLR Integration. Once that was done, all worked fine.

I hope this helps someone to avoid headaches in the future.

Technorati Tags: CLR, SQL, SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005

AJAX and Atlas

I just started looking into AJAX. I am a .NET developer by trade, so naturally, I am looking at the Atlas framework which plugs into ASP.NET and lets you take advantage of AJAX techniques in web apps.

I worked with a tutorial last night and I was not impressed, but I watched a tutorial video earlier today and I now understand it a lot more. It is some very interesting technology.

See more progress on: learn ajax

Technorati Tags: Atlas, AJAX, .NET, ASP.NET

SQL weakness

One of my big weaknesses at work is SQL. I have been at the same job for almost 17 years. Unfortunately, my skills have been retarded due to the things that we do with our client software.

I was doing some things for a new piece of software today that uses a MSSQL for data persistence. I was doing a join on two tables, but I was not getting the results back that I expected. I finally figured out that I needed a “left join”, because not all of the records for one table had matching records in the joined table.

See more progress on: Become a better programmer