Please visit Kris's blog for detalied explanantion.

The brief summary 

First you'll need to open up SQL Server Configuration Manager. Navigate to that in the menu like Microsoft SQL Server 2005 > Configuration tools > SQL Server Configuration Manager.

Double click, or right click and choose Properties, of the selected line and you'll get the properties window

You'll need to make sure that the Local system is selected.

The second part of the solution's to delete the following folder on your hard drive: c:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server Data\SQLEXPRESS⁽¹⁾. This folder's used to store information and apparently it messes up the proper working of SQL Express.

11/18/2006 8:19:19 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1] 

Eric Wise has posted this cool tip on accessing windows authenticated sites in firefox

To enable windows authentication on your domain.

1. Open Firefox

2. Navigate to the url about:config

3. Locate the following preference names and put as the value the comma separated values of the address roots.

network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris

network.negotiate-auth.delegation-uris

network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris

Your value should look something like this: localhost,server1,server2,serverX

11/18/2006 3:26:48 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [10] 

System.Xml.XSL.XslTransform is deprecated(obsolete) in .Net 2.0  framework. What this means is the old method of applying  the transform method(XSL.Transform) is not going to work in the future versions of the framework. Instead, you need to apply the transform method of System.Xml.Xsl.XslCompiledTransform class.

I  literally spent hours trying to figure out how to do this. all the online samples were pretty "useless", until i found this. Thanks to everyone. It made me feel better, that i was not alone with this problem.

This is the helper class, Many thanks to Willis

public static class XslHelper
{
   public static String TransformInMemory(XslCompiledTransform transform, String input)
   {
      StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
      XmlReader xReader = XmlReader.Create(new StringReader(input));
      XmlWriter xWriter = XmlWriter.Create(sb);
      transform.Transform(xReader, xWriter);
      return sb.ToString();
   }

   public static String TransformInMemory(String transform, String input)
   {
      XslCompiledTransform xsl = new XslCompiledTransform();
      xsl.Load(XmlReader.Create(new StringReader(transform)));
      return TransformInMemory(xsl, input);
   }
}

Happy Programming!!

11/13/2006 1:36:33 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

There is so much buzz about Ajax that literally it is used everywhere over the web. But people often forget the price we pay for using Ajax literally everywhere. It makes the sites to load slow, respond slow but the features are too coool. Classic example being the new yahoo mail.

Take a look at this article from Jeff. It is amazing to see what a 0.5 delay in a site response time could do to customer satisfaction

11/12/2006 5:36:59 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

one would assume that it is easy to use ASP.Net Site Configuration tool. i had to spend around 2 hrs to get this straight. I apparently had every problem you could encounter..

ASP.Net Site Configuration on a server

Steps to follow

Extablish mixed authentication mode

10/27/2006 5:17:30 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0] 

was in seattle, vancouver for my visa. hence the break.

10/26/2006 4:23:40 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0] 

all links from Jason Haley

Cool article

Effective presentation

10/26/2006 4:04:36 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0] 

I have implemented some cool page transition effects. These tags eliminate the flashing when the page loads (when you click on a link etc). Thanks to Nikhil for giving this excellent piece of code.

<meta http-equiv="Page-Exit"
    content="progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Fade(duration=.5)" />

10/10/2006 2:06:40 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0] 

Yahoo is warming up to .Net programmers. Now any one can access yahoo resources through their API's upon authetication through a browser. This is an awesome move in so many ways. this would help the users in accessing all their resources at yahoo,etc(standalone or through API's)  through a common single application. Talking about single point access, Netvibes and pageflakes are creating a lot of buzz these days.

10/9/2006 5:10:12 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0] 

Often times as a developer we all need to insert new records into a table in a database and also retrieve the identity id of the most recently added row. The most common solution to this situation is use @@Identity. Simple eh? No, because @@Identity returns the most recently created identity for your connection.  So if there is any other operation going on like a trigger, the identity created by the trigger would be returned instead of yours.

So it is better to use scope_identity() always.

Naming stored procedure with a prefix of sp_ is pretty common, i should say that is the current norm. But Apparently this is a bad habbit because the system databases are the only ones that should be named with prefix sp_.
Long story short, SQL server starts looking for any stored procedure with a prefix sp_ in the Master database.

For more on the above feature,  go here . Pretty cool dont's info on SQL practices

10/5/2006 5:01:33 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0] 

Microsoft is offering free E-learning courses This should be a pretty cool deal for all the newbies.

10/5/2006 2:29:42 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]