This error kept me busy all morning and part of the afternoon:

An error has occurred 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: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)

This error seems to be affecting more developers - according to some forums and blogs - but none of them had a solution.

After trying some workarounds I finally found one that worked: The SQL port - 1433 -  needs to be included as part of Data Source on the connection string:...Data Source=mysqlserver\instance1,1433;...

That did it for me.

Note that the error was happening when connecting to a SQL Server 2000 from a .NET 2.0 web application.

I'm not sure the real cause of this problem or why it was happening in the first place.

I also posted my workaround on the following forums:http://blogs.msdn.com/sql_protocols/archive/2007/03/31/named-pipes-provider-error-40-could-not-open-a-connection-to-sql-server.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessagehttp://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2475976&SiteID=1&mode=1

I was asked how to convert SAS dates to SQL datetimes. Most of the time all it takes is simple Google search to find the solution for requests like this one, well not this time.

I created a function that do the conversion and wanted to share it with you all :-)

Follow these steps to reset the MySQL root user privileges on Windows:

1- Stop the MySQL service

2- Open a command prompt and run the following command:

D:\MySQL\MySQL Server 4.1\bin>mysqld-nt --skip-grant-tables

3- Open a new command prompt and connect to the mysqld server with this command:

D:\MySQL\MySQL Server 4.1\bin>mysql -u root

4- Issue the following statements in the mysql client:

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

mysql> USE mysql;

mysql> REPLACE INTO user VALUES ('localhost','root','','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','','','','',0,0,0,0);

mysql> REPLACE INTO user VALUES ('%','root','','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','','','','',0,0,0,0);

mysql> quit;

5- Open the windows task manager and kill the process with name mysqld-nt.exe

6- Start the MySQL service and now you will have the...

I remember that some time ago I had the need to interact with a library written in .NET from MS SQL 2000. Creating a COM+ object using managed code was the first thing that came to my mind (I had done it before using C++). I googled it for a little bit but couldn't find the right way to get this done and since I was really in a hurry ended up creating a simple console application that was called using xp_cmdshell.

Today I had the time to revisit this issue and this time in less than 1 minute the right article came on top of my search results: Microsoft Enterprise Services allows you to create Microsoft COM+ applications using the .NET Framework.

This is the article that explains this process in details:http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306296

How to invoke COM applications from SQL?http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/dasanka/callingcomfromtsql.asp

Imagine the following scenario: The table defined below is populated with "key values" available to a given application. These values are generated by other application and inserted in batches from time to time into this "key pool" table.

/* Create table */CREATE TABLE [KeyPool]([KeyPoolId] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,[Key] [varchar](30) NOT NULL,[IsUsed] [bit] NOT NULLCONSTRAINT [PK_KeyPool] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([KeyPoolId] ASC))

/* Insert test values */INSERT INTO [KeyPool] ([Key], [IsUsed]) VALUES ('KEY00001',0)INSERT INTO [KeyPool] ([Key], [IsUsed]) VALUES ('KEY00002',0)INSERT INTO [KeyPool] ([Key], [IsUsed]) VALUES ('KEY00002',0)INSERT INTO [KeyPool] ([Key], [IsUsed]) VALUES ('KEY00003',0)INSERT INTO [KeyPool] ([Key], [IsUsed]) VALUES ('KEY00004',0)INSERT INTO [KeyPool] ([Key], [IsUsed]) VALUES ('KEY00005',0)INSERT INTO [KeyPool] ([Key], [IsUsed]) VALUES ('KEY00006',0)INSERT INTO [KeyPool] ([Key], [IsUsed]) VALUES ('KEY00007',0)

How you select a unique key from this table and also marking it as "used" so is not returned again. Given the current conditions, around 5 different processes may be requesting a value at the same time.

...

Shows how to convert an object to a byte array using the binary formater and then encoding the resulting byte array to a Base64-encoded System.String.

Today I was asked to look into an interesting task that was keeping busy one of my colleagues for a while. It's such a common task that I'm wondering how come I was never presented with something similar before.Let's use an example to better illustrate the task on hand. Imagine you have a notification system that runs daily and creates a list of different events for what individual users need to be notified. This table represents the notification list resulted from the daily run:UserId        EventId-------------------    1        1    1        2    1        3    2        2    3        2    3        4    3        5    4        2    Now a new requirement comes up: All events will be assigned a priority and the users can only received 2 notifications a day for the events with the highest priority.This table represents our Events and their Priority (the bigger the number the highest is the priority):EventId         Priority--------------------    1                8    2                9    3                10    4  ...

Introducing the SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard

Creating a .NET Custom Control with culture-awareness built-in. This code was originally designed for .NET 1.1 but it also works in 2.0

How to avoid the Thread was being aborted error when calling .net webservices by not exceeding the time-out threshold for an ASP.NET request.