Sometimes Excel doesn't behave as you expect and you learn something. Excel is complex as Joel Spolsky pointed out last week. Quite often clients will send data updates in Excel spreadsheets as this is the format they are used to working with; even if you as a programmer are not. One such workbook I have worked with …

Quite often you work on databases that you didn't write. Getting up to speed on the structure of the tables and the relationships between them is not something you relish. The GUIs provided by SQL Server 2000 or 2005 don't always provide the best way, particularly with regard to complex referential integrity. I've …

MOSS and WSS 3.0 handle user profiles differently. In MOSS, user profile information is stored centrally and can be shared across site collections. Profiles can be manipulated using the UserProfileManager class found in Microsoft.Office.Server.dll. Life just isn't the same when working with WSS 3.0. When developing a …

Very funny.

Normally you don't encounter permission errors when installing to the global assembly cache (GAC). Today I did, even though I was logged on as a member of the administrators group (not that being an administrator is a guarantee of much). If you navigate using Windows Explorer to %windir%\assembly, what you see is the …

Big thank you to Penny Coventry and Steve Smith for presenting at the SharePoint User Group UK Newcastle meeting on Wednesday night. Both were excellent sessions. Penny gave an overview of SharePoint Designer, which if not already, will probably become your default tool for design and basic development of SharePoint …

SharePoint 2007 displays a nice "friendly" error message when anything goes wrong. This "friendly" error message usually provides no useful information about why the error has occurred (sometimes you get an HRESULT). It may be friendly but isn't usually very helpful, not for a developer. You can …

Gary Short is speaking at Glasgow Caledonian University, 7pm, 16th January 2008. I saw him speak at DDD 6 and he was excellent. Well worth a trip to see. Link to presentation details

In SQL Server 2000 you could query the sysdatabases table to find out the "status" of a database. This field was actually a bit mask and the sysdatabases table is only available in SQL Server 2005 for backwards compatability. The sysdatabases table "maps" to the sys.databases system view. The old …

Want to know which deleted windows user accounts still have entries in the SQL Server system tables? EXEC sp_validatelogins MSDN article on sp_validatelogins.