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FYI: Bank cheques don't have an expiry date.  Personal cheques have a lifetime of 18 months.  I had to go to the bank today, so took along one of John's really old cheques from 2003 (it was a bank cheque) on the off chance that it was still good.  Apparantly bank cheques have no expiry data..YAY!

Showed John this the other night..so thought might aswell blog it case someone else is interested. 

If you're trying to create some data or need a GUID you can do it using an inbuilt tool in Visual Studio.

Can be found under Tools / Create GUID

I usually use the Registry Format if i'm play with sql server or NUnit.  Then you can just hit New GUID or Copy depending on what you want to do.

Been playing with using supplied XML to join to tables in a select statement.  So i thought I'd do a simple example to remind myself next time i need to do it..

So i have the following xml structure:

<Categories>
  <id>3</id>
  <id>6</id>
  <id>15</id>
</Categories>

So to use it in a proc I do the following:

ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[GetItemsByCategories] 
	@Categories xml

AS
BEGIN

SET NOCOUNT ON;
SELECT 
    	i.ItemName
FROM 
	[dbo].[Item] i
INNER JOIN 
	[dbo].[Category] c ON i.[CategoryID] = c.[CategoryID]
INNER JOIN
	@Categories.nodes('/Categories/id') as ParamValues(ID) 
	ON c.CategoryID = ParamValues.ID.value('.', 'int')
END

I'm running XP, and after a windows update I was getting svchoste.exe errors.  This cause a range of weird errors on my machine, like the theme going back to XP Classic and a selected number of things not working.

I was ready to spend the morning rebuilding my lappy...when i found this hotfix (KB894391).  I ran it, rebooted and my machine is happy again .

Why aren't I running Vista you all may ask...cause Dell lied about the Vista upgrade eligibility.

I just put together what i hope is a really good reference for anyone wanting to change the look and feel of the V4 virtual earth dashboard.

Read the article.

Please let me know if I have missed anything and post a link to your site with your new dashboard below.

 These guys have a really good article on ASP 2.0's Membership, role and profiles. The part I found very useful was the section on adding the MS membership schema to an existing database. 

You can run the aspnet_regsql.exe tool from a command prompt and it allows you to add or remove the membership schema tables from an existing database. 

If you're adding the schema into your own db, next you have to modify your web.config to point to your db.

Add your connection string

<CONNECTIONSTRINGS>
  <ADD name="SSTEST" connectionString="Data Source=SS;Initial 
Catalog=SSTest;Integrated Security=True" />

Then set the role and membership provider to point to your db

<CONFIGURATION>
    ... authentication & authorization settings ...

    <ROLEMANAGER defaultProvider="CustomizedRoleProvider" enabled="true">
      <PROVIDERS>
         <ADD name="CustomizedRoleProvider" connectionStringName="SSTest" type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider"
applicationName="MyTestApp" />
      </PROVIDERS>
    </ROLEMANAGER>

    <MEMBERSHIP defaultProvider="CustomizedMembershipProvider">
      <PROVIDERS>
         <ADD name="CustomizedMembershipProvider" connectionStringName="SSTest" 
type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider" 
applicationName="MyTestApp"/>
      </PROVIDERS>
    </MEMBERSHIP>

  </SYSTEM.WEB>
</CONFIGURATION>

The table fo regex characters for find and replace in VS2005, eg start of line, end of line, zero or more.

Read More »

Just had to do this on Vista today and got an interesting object error on line:

Response.Redirect("~/Install/Install.aspx?mode=Install")

I wonder if this has changed in IIS7 in integrated mode?

Anyway the solution I found is to change to "classic mode" to do the upgrade then change back.

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There are now a stack of photos up on the look up and smile site. If you want a really fast way to browse through them the local.live gadget is the way to go:
http://www.live.com/?add=http://www.lookupandsmile.com.au/gadget/LUASGadget.xml

My favorites:

• Flag house
• possum in beer
• toad in the pool
• ned kelly sandcastle
• Starwars and Starwars

So what is your favorite?