Obscuring Your Intent in Code

As you may have noticed, I haven’t blogged much recently. About a year and a half ago, I took on a long-term project that has soaked up all of my free time, and then some. Apologies to anyone who came here looking for content; I intend to post more frequently now. I had thought the […]

SQL Server 2008 “Timeout expired” error and SP1

I recently came across another error when using SQL Server 2008. I recently applied Service Pack 1 to my server’s installation of SQL Server 2008. I had not done any development since then using the full version of SQL Server on the server; instead, as you will note from my recent blog entries on the […]

Norton Internet Security: you have exceeded the number of activations allowed—and you are cut off!

WOW. I am shocked at the user-unfriendliness of Norton’s approach here. I had my Norton Internet Security automatically renewed last month. Although I was surprised at the price increase, I decided to live with it. Until today. Just now, I was working on an issue with Windows Installer on my desktop machine, when Norton suddenly […]

Fixing SQL error 5170: Cannot create file ‘C:\[...]\APP_DATA\ASPNETDB_TMP.MDF’ because it already exists.in ASP.NET

The problem I recently had, for the first time, to create a brand-new ASP.NET web application that made use of the built-in Membership/Roles functionality, using the default of SQL Server Express, NOT a full installation of SQL Server. I had previously wrestled with issues when upgrading an older application using Membership/Roles to ASP.NET 4.0, and […]

ASP.NET/SQL Server: Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server; Login failed for user ‘NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE’

While working on an ASP.NET 4.0 web application that uses the built-in Membership tools, I recently encountered the above two errors which prevented the site from working until sorted. I suspect the errors were triggered by the SP1 update to SQL Server 2008, as the application was working fine prior to my finally applying the […]

CSS 3.0: fixing IE 8 and below with PIE

I recently set out to spice up my website with some CSS 3 features; namely, border-radius and box-shadow. These can be very effective in causing parts of your page to stand out, especially when used together, though there are some caveats to doing so, which I will discuss later. The main point of this post, […]

Google’s App Inventor for Android – no programming required?

Creating Android apps with App Inventor: no programming required? Created my first Android app last night using App Inventor–the claim is, “no programming required”, and it seems to live up to that—in a way. Rather than typing programming commands into an editor, per standard programming practice, you snap together pre-defined “blocks” of functionality by dragging and dropping […]