Amazon Simple Storage Services(Backup Services ?) - thought this was yet another flash in the pan, dumb me. It looks pretty cool, nice pricing schemes, good API, free tools etc. Looks like I have found a place dump all my files i have been carrying around like for ever. I would follow up with once I get deep into it.

12/7/2006 6:11:48 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

The checked keyword is used to control the overflow-checking context for integral-type arithmetic operations and conversions

12/7/2006 6:06:02 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

here are some good FAQs on security from Channel9

11/30/2006 5:45:11 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

GuidanceExplorer is a great reference 

11/26/2006 6:55:52 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

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]