Jeremy Coenen

Shortly after setting up a new SQL server I often find myself getting this message and well I google and find out what the problem is and fix. Well I figured I’m going to start posting more of these “duh” troubleshooting problems on my blog. That way I can still forget them, google the problem, and then read the answer on my blog.

Anyway if you get this error it pretty much means that when you were setting up SQL Server you went with all the defaults, which means SQL Authentication is not enabled and you can only connect to the server via Windows Authentication.

To fix simply

• connect to the server via windows authentication in SQL Server Management Studio.
• Right click on the server you want to configure and select ‘Properties’
• Then click on the security section
• Then in the first topic ‘Server authentication’ - select to the radio box for ‘SQL Server and Windows authentication mode’
• Click OK
• Restart the SQL Service and get back to work

*Note this was for SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server management studio, but it should be very similar if not identical in SQL Server 2000 and Enterprise Manager.

Jon Galloway just posted a pretty cool registry hack on his website that allows you to quickly delete all the hidden subversion folders from a directory. This is extremely helpful if you want to move/copy your local folders to another location and don’t want all the subversion mappings.

I don’t know how many times I have gone through the process of copying a folder to my desktop and then searching for all the svn folders and deleting them. Now I can easily delete them all in one step.

Note: because I’m using the subversion asp.net hack and all my subversion folders are _svn instead of .svn I modified the shell command to be like so, that way it works no matter which way you have subversion configuredWindows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\DeleteSVN]
@=”Delete SVN Folders”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\DeleteSVN\command]
@=”cmd.exe /c \”TITLE Removing SVN Folders in %1 && COLOR 9A && FOR /r \”%1\” %%f IN (.svn,_svn) DO RD /s /q \”%%f\” \”"

The only thing better would be a “Copy Without SVN folders” command

I recently found out that there is in fact a .Net users group in the area. The Fox Valley .Net Users Group meets the 3rd Wednesday of each month at Fox Valley Technical College room F108 from 6-9pm. I have never been to a .Net users group before last Wednesday, but from what I have have read and heard about .net users groups are usually a pretty good time. So I was pretty excited to find that one met just a few miles from my house.

I’ve only been to the one meeting, but here is the general gist of how a meeting normally goes. 6:00 pm people show up at enjoy FREE pizza and soda, 6:30ish the meeting starts and there is usually a speaker who comes in to talk about specific topic. The speaker can be a member of the .net users group, a local technology expert, or a professional INETA speaker (from what I heard I believe we get 3 INETA speakers from Microsoft each year), I’m sure sometime before or after the speaker there is some administrative stuff and listening to one of the podcasts of a previous meeting I heard door prize give aways.

The FVNUG (Fox Valley .Net Users Group) doesn’t sound like its been around all that long (less than a year?) so that’s probably why I hadn’t heard of them until now, but they usually have roughly 30-40 people at a meeting (last weeks meeting was a little light due to some communication problems). Seems like a great networking opportunity as well as change to learn from some pretty smart dudes.

You can get pretty much all the information you need to know from their website http://fvnug.wi-ineta.org/ including next meeting topics, podcasts of each meeting, meeting notes provided by the speakers, etc.

Well here’s a list of things that I learned in attending my first .Net users group.

1. In SQL Server Enterprise Manager you can insert a null into a column by pressing the control key & 0 (zero)
2. You can get the mouse scroll button to work in Visual Basic 6.0 - see Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 837910
3. I brought up that you can ctrl & C any object in enterprise manager and paste it into notepad and get the script (thanks to Paul Wilson for making me sound smart)
4. Ctrl K & D will autoformat your aspx code in VS (knew this one but a very good tip for anyone that doesn’t know)
5. Very detailed demo on How to setup a project on SourceForge.net - thanks to Joe Wetzel
6. CSS vs table based layout of web pages (see CSSZenGarden )
7. Microsoft is coming out with Microsoft Expressions product for the more GUI inclined CSS developers
8. You can embed IIF statements within IIF statements - a horrible idea unless you really want to make sure no one else can maintain your code (increased job security).

I’m sure I’m forgetting quite a few good tips, but at least these are the ones that I took away from the meeting. Anyway next meeting is November 15th and the speaker is Chris Fleming from Skyline Technologies to talk about SQL Server 2005. Did I mention there will be FREE pizza?