The number one rule of business is to not make it hard for people to give you money. Defying that time tested rule, is Intuit with their upgrade path from Quicken 2008 to Quicken 2009. From what I was told if you are trying to upgrade the edition of the quicken (i.e. basic to premium), then you ca... [More]

There are times when you want to forcefully reset a given website application's AppDomain. One specific scenario where this might happen is if you are storing application settings in a database as opposed to the web.config file. It turns out this is easy to accomplish by calling: System.Web.Http... [More]

I've often told my developers that throwing errors is a good thing. You want to know about errors when they occur or they will never get fixed. Obviously, that does not mean you should not handle errors, but a far worse situation is when something looks right. As someone once said, "It is... [More]

I tried running VS 2008 SP1 today. I also happened to be running Office and SQL Server. Clearly, that was a mistake as the installer took its requisite hour to install only to tell me it errored. So, I rebooted and tried it again with nothing Microsoft running and it worked fine. I know I'm sh... [More]

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the SqlRoleProvider is not really designed to work when the SqlMembershipProvider points to a different application. You would want to do such a thing if you were creating a suite of application sites for which you wanted a single user list but wanted each applic... [More]

I struggled for a couple of days trying to work this one out. In short, we have a system which places a .NET veneer on top of ASP Classic to provide security. The trick in this scheme is to add a Wildcard mapping that points the the 2.0 aspnet_isapi.dll so that all requests are routed through .NET... [More]

Ran into this error today while trying to do an import. The scenario is that I had a linked server to an MS Access database. After a bit of search and using the force, I discovered that the problem was due to fields set to an empty string as opposed to Null. Running a quick update query that set the... [More]

The built-in RoleProvider has, IMO, a major flaw in its design.  Both the RoleProvider and the MembershipProvide allow for an "applicationName" attribute to be set. However, you quickly find out that when you have a RoleProvider configured, that the Membership static methods simply ... [More]

One of the many useful tools that comes with the XP Support Tools is a utility called TaskKill. TaskKill lets you dump a process that refuses to let you kill it from the Task Manager. On occasion, I have run into processes that would throw an "Access is denied" error when I try to kill it ... [More]

We have all heard solutions to the BCS. I admit, the BCS is a complete cluster !@#$%. It presumes that arm chair viewers can determine who are the two best teams instead of deciding it on the field. In addition, people will have a cow if the bowls are scrapped. My personal opinion is that the bowl... [More]