This month while involved on the redesign of a very popular website I decided not to use HTML tables anymore - or at least avoid its use as much as possible. Ten years ago - when I started building websites - Tables were your friends not your foe. Along came CSS and the idea of separating the content from the way it is presented.
 
CSS is been around for a while and almost all the sites currently use it somehow but do they use it well? Check out CSS Zen Garden and decide if your site allows being re-skinned as much as this ...

1. Uncommented the line "extension=php_curl.dll" in php.ini file.
2. Copied libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll to C:\WINDOWS\system32. 

This error kept me busy all morning and part of the afternoon:

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: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)

This error seems to be affecting more developers - according to some forums and blogs - but none of them had a solution.

After trying some workarounds I finally found one that worked:

The SQL port - 1433 -  needs to be included as part of Data Source on the connection string ...

I was asked how to convert SAS dates to SQL datetimes. Most of the time all it takes is simple Google search to find the solution for requests like this one, well not this time.

I created a function that do the conversion and wanted to share it with you all :-)

Follow these steps to reset the MySQL root user privileges on Windows:

1- Stop the MySQL service

2- Open a command prompt and run the following command:

D:\MySQL\MySQL Server 4.1\bin>mysqld-nt --skip-grant-tables

3- Open a new command prompt and connect to the mysqld server with this command:

D:\MySQL\MySQL Server 4.1\bin>mysql -u root

4- Issue the following statements in the mysql client:

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

I remember that some time ago I had the need to interact with a library written in .NET from MS SQL 2000. Creating a COM+ object using managed code was the first thing that came to my mind (I had done it before using C++). I googled it for a little bit but couldn't find the right way to get this done and since I was really in a hurry ended up creating a simple console application that was called using xp_cmdshell.

Today I had the time to revisit this issue and this time in less than 1 minute the right article came on top of my search results: Microsoft Enterprise Services allows you to create Microsoft COM+ applications using the .NET Framework.

& ...

Imagine the following scenario: The table defined below is populated with "key values" available to a given application. These values are generated by other application and inserted in batches from time to time into this "key pool" table.

/* Create table */
CREATE TABLE [KeyPool](
[KeyPoolId] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
[Key] [varchar](30) NOT NULL,
[IsUsed] [bit] NOT NULL
CONSTRAINT [PK_KeyPool] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED
([KeyPoolId] ASC))

/* Insert test values */
INSERT INTO [KeyPool] ([Key], [IsUsed]) VALUES ('KEY00001',0)
INSERT INTO [KeyPool] ([Key], [IsUsed]) VALUES ('KEY00002',0)
INSERT INTO [KeyPool] ([Key], [IsUsed]) VALUES ('KEY00002',0)
INSERT INTO [KeyPool] ([Key] ...