Jess Coburn's Personal Blog

Archive for March, 2006

The full error is:

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: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 – Could not open a connection to SQL Server)

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I've been operating a photo gallery online for a long time, in fact I use https://gallery.menalto.com and recently upgraded to Gallery2 which is quite nice. But, with 5GB of images online it's time to clean up my act. Plus, we're a windows shop so I should have something more windows-centric. My gallery being over 5GB also made me realize that maybe this wasn't the best way to archive my images and I really don't need the original images online because no one but me seems interested in the full sized image. So what am I going to use? At home I use Picasa (http://picasa.google.com or http://www.picasa.com ) to organize all my images on my desktop, it scans your drives and sorts all your images via date and has an awesome interface. So for me the gallery solution I pick would be best to integrate with Picasa which narrows the field down. I'd also like to use a flash gallery. I think static galleries are just outdated and it's time to step it up. Initially I was going to go with the javascript app but the flash apps are just streamlined and the integration with picasa is a no brainer So the galleries that I've identified are: Read the rest of this entry »

SDN has a a new thing they've been doing for the past couple months called Source Force. Promoting a series of *FREE*, have you noticed I really like free, this blog should be renamed to "Jess's list of free and cool tools", Anyway a series of Free Virtual Labs on the MSDN site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/virtuallabs/. What's better than getting free training? Free toys! If you do a couple labs and submit evaluations you'll get a free limited edition action figure (I suspect there's some office in Redmond right now with a thousand of these little guys all lined up battling).So I can highly recommend the Training labs from Fritz Onion. I picked up one of Fritz's books on ASP.net and C# a couple years ago and find it one of my best most targetted and straight to the point books. His training is quite good and he really follows through with it including follow up items on his blog. Just one thing on the free toys, they're only available for the Months of Jan, Feb, Mar and Apr so better hurry while you can.