When I did a quick search online, I found some keyboard shortcuts for Visual Studio 2008 that didn’t work for me, so thought I would get a post going.

Comment and Uncomment Code Blocks Quickly

I comment blocks of code in VS2008 with:

CTRL-E, C

…and I uncomment blocks of code with:

CRTL-E, U

Here is an example of code to get stripped down contact and account forms. This code is placed in the onLoad event of the respective forms. Note: this is not supported, but a common way to hide left navigation links on specific entities (since normal site map customization does not affect these).

We had an issue where BAM stopped working after installing SOA Suite on a Windows 2003 Server (BAM only runs on Windows at the time of this writing).

After trying to uninstall/reinstall many times ourselves, Oracle Support suggested that this was not a compatible configuration. We have done it before (in play environments), but this clearly can cause some issues that are not easy to resolve. So, in this case, we ended up splitting the installation to different machines and have been sleeping much better at night.

Here is how I find out what SQL Server 2005 DB I am playing with:

1. Log into any DB in your SS 2005 instance
2. Run the following query

SELECT SERVERPROPERTY('productversion'), SERVERPROPERTY ('productlevel'), SERVERPROPERTY ('edition')

Did your personal IIS stop working recently — the one you run on XP perhaps? Did you get the following error in your event logs?


Event Type: Error
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 115
Date: 4/23/2006
Time: 12:28:08 PM
User: N/A
Computer: F4005
Description:
The service could not bind instance 1. The data is the error code.

For additional information specific to this message please visit the Microsoft Online Support site located at:
http://www.microsoft.com/contentredirect.asp.


This error is normally the result of another application/service on your machine listening on network Port 80.

But you’re sure you don’t have any other web servers, etc. running, right? This can be frustrating to troubleshoot. So, before you uninstall everything one by one, be sure to check Skype. As Skype gains popularity, my guess is more and more people will be getting this error and scratching their heads.

To stop the error from occurring in IIS, go to “Tools”, then “Options…” in your Skype applications. In the “Connection” section, be sure to UNCHECK “Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections”.

Click “Save” and restart Skype. Restart IIS. You should be good to go.

I hope this helps someone!

RDL and RDLC conversion is something that people who use both Reporting Services and ReportViewer have already done. For those of you who have not looked at these technologies, you really need to. Taking reports written for a full-featured reporting engine like SSRS and instead integrating that into a custom application (which does NOT require SSRS, let alone SQL Server) has huge market value along with technical value.

Following is a good lesson on RDL to RDLC conversion as well as RDLC to RDL conversion:

RDL and RDLC Conversion

Note: of course, if you have any issues with this or other ReportViewer and/or SSRS issues, feel free to engage us as we have been through many of the challenges.

This assumes Outlook 2003, Windows XP Professional, and a default configuration.

Email Messages
If everything is stored in Exchange Server, then just configuring your Exchange profile should bring down all mail from the server.

If you are using local email storage, you will want to move your .pst file(s) to the new machine.

Signatures
C:Documents and Settings[username]Application DataMicrosoftSignatures

Rules
Export rules from within Outlook (click “Options” button in the rules configuration area). You will save them onto your harddrive as [something].rwz. Import these rules to the new machine.

Navigation Pane Settings
C:Documents and Settings[user]Application DataMicrosoftOutlook[profile].xml

Nicknames
C:Documents and Settings[user]Application DataMicrosoftOutlook[profile].nk2

• Processor Licensing Model. Under this model, a license is required for each physical or virtual processor accessed by an operating system environment running SQL Server. This license does not require any device or user client access licenses (CALs).
• Server plus Device CALs. Under this model, a server license is required for each operating system environment running an instance of SQL Server, as well as a CAL for each client device that accesses a system running SQL Server.
• Server plus User CALs. Under this model, a server license is required for each operating system environment running an instance of SQL Server, as well as a CAL for each user that accesses a system running SQL Server.

High-Level Pricing For SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition

Processor Licensing
~6K/Processor

Server Plus User/Device CAL Licensing
~2K/Server
~$160/(user or device)

Do you have contacts in your contact folder(s) and wonder why your email doesn’t automatically check against them when sending a message? I noticed this issue when working with Outlook 2003, while using Exchange 2003 and RPC over HTTP. The resolution was actually easy, but it took enough clicking that I thought I would share the solution:

To add your contacts folder as an “Outlook Address Book”:

1. Right click your folder containing contacts (i.e. “Contacts”)
2. Click “Properties”
3. Click the “Outlook Address Book” tab
4. Select the “Show this folder as an e-mail Address Book” checkbox
5. Click the “OK” button

To add this as one of the address books where email should check names against:

1. In the top menu, click “Tools”
2. Click “Address Book…”
3. A new box will pop up
4. In the top menu, click “Tools”
5. Click “Options…”
6. You will see a list of address books that get checked when sending mail
7. Click “Add…”
8. Select your folder (should be indented and listed under Outlook Address Book)
9. You can move this up to the top so emails checks in it first; you can also select to keep personal contacts in it and even select it as the default address book for Outlook

If you have installed SQL Server 2005, it is likely you have installed the samples as well. In my case, I installed what I thought to be everything, realizing that the samples did not install. When I went in through the normal set up to install them, I was not able to.

Thankfully, I found a workaround that prevented me from having to uninstall and reinstall…

1. Go to Start –> Control Panel –> Add/Remove Programs
2. Click “Change” for SQL Server 2005
3. Entering the setup from this approach, you will have the option to add/change components.
4. Follow the wizard, and when given the option to add components, choose the “Workstation Components” checkbox.
5. Change the installed components as you would with any other Microsoft application.
6. Complete the wizard.

To actually install the samples, you will need to:

1. Navigate to n:Program FilesMicrosoftSQL Server90ToolsSamples and double-click SqlServerSamples.msi to launch the installer.
2. Navigate to the the installed location (default is n:Program FilesMicrosoftSQL Server90Samples) and have at it!

Note: These steps do not apply to recreating a sample database that has been deleted. For that, you will correct that using installation scripts, which can be found easily in BOL.