Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Archive for March, 2006
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.
Mar 27th
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)
So I have SQL express running on my desktop and fired up the commerce starter kit 1.1beta1 (www.commercestarterkit.org) and was curious why it was throwing this error. The connection string looks like this: connectionString="Data Source=localhost; initial catalog=Commerce; user ID=USERNAME; password=PASSWORD;" Turns out that you actually have to set the Data Source to the actual machine name and instance. So if your workstation is named mybox and your instance of SQL express is named SQLEXPRESS your connection string will look like this: connectionString="Data Source=mybox\sqlexpress; initial catalog=Commerce; user ID=USERNAME; password=PASSWORD;" That should resolve it. I found this fix by searching on the error and came up with it from the url: http://geekswithblogs.net/timh/archive/2006/01/30/67586.aspx Jess
Flash Photo Galleries
Mar 26th
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 I think static galleries are just outdated and it's time to step it up.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:
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PiPiView – no it's not a view of my pee-pee, it's actually short for Picture Pile Viewer and can be seen here: http://pipiview.companje.nl/pipiview/2005/07/see-it-work.asp
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SlideShowPro – it's a bit more of a professional style gallery application, it can be seen here: http://www.slideshowpro.net/
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PostCardViewer – http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/postcardviewer/example/
Meet the Source Force — Free Training Virtual Labs — Free Toys!
Mar 23rd
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.
Extending IIS6 HTTP Error Logging
Mar 15th
IIS6 has a new feature that allows for logging errors to a seperate file. However, little documentation is immediately available on how to configure this or atleast little know. Anyway, here's a link to a KB article at Microsoft that details what additional properties are available for loggin in the HTTPERR# log files: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832975
Free copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard and Free ASP.net 2.0 Training
Mar 13th
Microsoft, Dr. Dobbs and O'REILLY are offering Free ASP.net 2.0 training with courses for JSP, PHP and Coldfusion developers looking to migrate over to the dark side. To sweeten the pie you also get a nice pack of freebies, including a copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition, a 50% discount on a MCP exam and some other goodies. Regardless it's a good deal and the training sessions are awesome. Many of them are by Fritz Onion who is an awesome trainer and book author. http://www.learn2asp.net/Campaign.aspx has all the goodies.
