Blueblooded Techie

Book Review: Community Server Quickly

BinaryGuy — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 13:46:00 GMT

I have reviewed Ananad Narayanaswamy's new book on Community Server - Community Server Quickly on ASPAlliance. Read about it here and please leave your comments.
Thanks
Sreejath

An error has occured while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005...

BinaryGuy — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 07:35:00 GMT

I encountered the following error while transitioning a .NET application from the development environment to the Integration test environment:

"An error has occured while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005,this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections.(provider:Named Pipes Provider,error:40-Could not open connection to SQL Server))"

This had me stumped for a while as our application was using SQL Server 2000 as the database. After some googling, I found the following post by Richard Byham on DBForums that gave me the solution.

http://www.dbforums.com/showthread.php?t=1204986

The IT environment DB Server and the client machines had (for some strange reason) SQL Server Express installed. The SQL server 2000 installation on the server (which had the actual DB used by the application) was a named instance. Due to this, the client code was encountering problems in accessing the SQL Server. After uninstalling the SQL Server 2005 Express and reinstalling SQL Server 2000 as recommended in the post, everything started working again.

But it sure gave us a few tense moments before we figured this one out.

Windows Live Writer - Initial Impressions

BinaryGuy — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 00:26:00 GMT

Got my hands on Windows Live Writer couple of days ago and have been playing with it for a while. The interface looks cool, though I would have preferred a true MDI interface. It has all the (by now) standard formatting features (bold, italic, underline, strikethrough et al). The sidebar with the drafts, recent posts and the Insert menu in place is a useful addition.
Also, the ability to insert a map (road map or satellite/bird's eye view) from Live Local looks cool.

WLW has out of the box support for around 10 of the most popular providers, though I couldn't see .Text (my favourite) listed; presumably because this has now been subsumed by CommunityServer. MS has also published an SDK that enables developers to enhance the app or to develop plugins. There already a couple of plugins featured on the WindowsLive.

However, when I tried posting on to a blog that I have hosted on blogger, I had to login to blogger and explicitly publish from there before the posts showed up in my blog.

I have downloaded the SDK to put together some plugins and will be blogging about how it goes.

Cheers!
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Regards,
Sreejath S. Warrier

Developing MMC snapins using MMC 3.0 SDK AND .NET 2.0

BinaryGuy — Tue, 02 May 2006 04:33:00 GMT

In my current project I was tasked with developing the Admin Interface for the Application we are building.
This needed to be implemented as an MMC Snapin.
The current release version of the MMC SDK is 2.0, but developing a snapin against 2.0 involves mucking around in unmanaged C++ which I was not very keen on doing.
So we decided to develop the Admin Console using the (pre-release) MMC 3.0 SDK, which requires .NET 2.0.
While the documentation and tutorials available in the Managed MMC topic on MSDN provided a good introduction to developing snapins using MMC 3.0 SDK, the samples I got from C Sharp Indonesia provided much more by way of actual code to implement the various requirements.
I am currently writing an article on developing real world snapins using MMC 3.0 and would post a link as soon as it is done.
Watch this space for updates.

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Regards,
Sreejath S. Warrier

Greetings

BinaryGuy — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 12:26:00 GMT

Greetings fellow Avanauts,
This is my first crack at maintaining a tech blog.
Needless to say, my first few posts might be a bit rough around the edges. Please bear with me!:-)
I intend to use this blog to air my views on tech issues and trends that I find interesting. Since I am working for Avanade, the emphasis would naturally be on MS Tech. However, I would also be airing my views on other technology trends that catch my fancy.

Thank you for stopping by and hope you will find something worth reading here in the future.
Regards,
Sreejath