Someone asked on one of the Microsoft .NET newsgroups how he could check whether or not SP1 for Visual Studio .NET 2003 was installed. Service Pack 1 is published in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as article number 918700 so in order to check whether SP1 is installed you could check for the existance of the following registry key:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFT... ......

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In case you need to find out the version of the SQL Server installed on a server you could execute the following statement:SELECT @@VERSION;Which returns on my development sandbox the following string:Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - 9.00.2047.00 (Intel X86) Apr 14 2006 01:12:25 Copyright (c) 1988-2005 Microsoft Corporation Developer Edition on Windows NT ......

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One of our .NET developers had problems with a ASP.NET application on his machine. Looking at the event viewer there was the following entry:Description: The description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( .NET Runtime ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote ......

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Or at least that's what the emails say (Doh!). If I have to believe those e-mails I won about 37 times $1,000,000 that makes me propably one of the richest persons in Belgium!Government Accredited Licensed lottery promoters.International Promotions/Prize Award DepartmentThis Lottery is approved by the Netherlands Gaming Board and also Licensedby ......

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Microsoft released a new version of the Remote Desktop Connection application aka as v6.0 of the Terminal Services Client. It contains several new features:Network Level AuthenticationServer AuthenticationResource RedirectionTerminal Servers GatewayTS Remote ProgramsMonitor spanningVisual Improvements (32-bit color depth, ClearType)Read all about these ......

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GameTrailers.com has posted two videos that show in-game footage of CoD 3 played on an Xbox 360, PS3 and the Nintendo Wii and the differences are astonishing, I guess that me saying that I need to ask my girlfriend a Xbox 360 for X-mas says it al? The video quality on the Wii is a bummer.http://www.gametrail... Cross-posted ......

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A couple of days ago one of our .NET developers asked me to help solve an issue on his machine. He said that his breakpoints were not being hit due to missing symbol files. I asked him to close Visual Studio and show me step by step how he debugs.He started Visual Studio 2005He opened his solutionHe publishes his site to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\<proj... ......

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Tom Hollander, a Product Manager working for the Microsoft patterns & practices group, discusses the new Validation Application Block that will be released in Enterprise Library for .NET Framework 3.0. It looks promising with the possibility to take a declarative or imperative approach. It would be nice if the validators could inherit some of the ......

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The team behind ReSharper released after several nightly builds EAP Build 312 which is the first Release Candidate for ReSharper 2.5. There is a known issue that you need to remove all your caches when you revert back to ReSharper 2.0.ReSharper 2.5 Build 312 (Visual Studio 2005) List of fixes Cross-posted from The .NET Aficionado ......

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I guess that we could somehow expect that are going to be a lot of issues trying to run existing products on Microsoft's latest Windows platform. So far I have tested 3 online banking solutions offered in Belgium and so far there was only 1 of them that works flawlessly in Windows Vista.So like I mentioned I tested 3 online banking solutions:KBC ......

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When I open certain media files they will no longer be opened in the Windows Media Player because the file associations were changed during the installation of Nero 7. In Windows XP when you start Windows Media Player and open the options screen there will be a tab where you can choose the file type associations. In Windows Vista however you will not ......

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Today someone asked me if I had told developer X that having a lot of if statements was better than a having a switch statement. I guess that developer X misunderstood what I told him a couple of weeks ago.I told him that if you have only 2 conditions that you need to check you can consider using an if statement. If you have more than 2 conditions use ......

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Just in case you haven't read about this on all the other blogs: Michael Swanson, a Technical Evangelist on "Avalon" related tools and components, released a version of his SWF2XAML which is a Flash to XAML converter. You can read more about it here. Cross-posted from The .NET Aficionado ......

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Why doesn't the IntelliSense show the Closed event of a form in WinForms 2.0 application?You don't see this member because it is decorated with the EditorBrowsable attribute passing the enum value EditorBrowsableState.Never to its constructor. The IntelliSense engine in Visual Studio doesn't show members that are marked as Never. This doesn't ......

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David Litchfield, a well known security expert, has created a report that compares the security flaws found in Oracle with those found in SQL Server. According to his report SQL Server 2005 is more secure than Oracle 10G Release 2 and he says that this is tanks to the Security Development Lifecycle.Although there are indeed no known security flaws in ......

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