Migrate from Access to SQL Server 2005 Express

Friday, November 28th, 2008

I thought that this might have been a real pain and to start it was until I found this little tool: ‘Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant for Access’. This made my life so much easier. At first I thought that is was only going to work for the full version and not Express. All I did was manually add the server name it was going to ‘XXXXX\SQLEXPRESS’ and the database name it was going to and that was it.

You can download the tool here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d842f8b4-c914-4ac7-b2f3-d25fff4e24fb&displaylang=en

The only other thing you have then got to be aware of is any SQL syntax differences - I was using nhibernate so this was not a problem (except for the column names that were reserved words in SQL Server and not access).

Have fun.

Steve Trotter - Project Manager - Dancer - Sesame Street Character

Friday, November 21st, 2008

Steve Trotter

Google Bot meta tags - unavailable_after

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

This is really useful for campaigns or time specific content:

We also want to make sure you’ve heard about the new unavailable_after META
tag announced by Dan Crow on the Official Google Blog a few weeks ago. This allows for a more dynamic relationship between your site and Googlebot. Just think, with www.example.com, any time you have a temporarily available news story or limited offer sale or promotion page, you can specify the exact date and time you want specific
pages to stop being crawled and indexed.

Let’s assume you are running a promotion that expires at the end of 2007. In the headers of page www.example.com/2007promotion.html, you would use the following:

<META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT”
CONTENT=”unavailable_after: 31-Dec-2007 23:59:59 EST”>

The second exciting news: the new X-Robots-Tag directive, which adds Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) META tag support for non-HTML pages! Finally, you can have the same control over your videos, spreadsheets, and other indexed file types. Using the example above, let’s say your promotion page is in PDF format. For www.example.com/2007promotion.pdf, you would use the following:

X-Robots-Tag: unavailable_after: 31 Dec
2007 23:59:59 EST

Remember, REP META tags can be useful for implementing noarchive, nosnippet, and now unavailable_after tags for page-level instruction, as opposed to robots.txt, which is controlled at the domain root. We get requests from bloggers and webmasters for these features, so enjoy. If you have other suggestions, keep them coming. Any questions? Please ask them in the Webmaster Help Group.

Intelisense for jQuery in Visual Studio

Saturday, November 8th, 2008

As jQuery is being shipped with the MVC framework I suppose I will have to move away from Prototype -oh well I am sure what I learnt won’t be wasted.

It would be so useful if Visual Studio provided some intelisense for JavaScript (more than it does actually give) so after a small amout of Googling I found this post:

http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/2008/02/01/intellisense-for-jquery-in-visual-studio-2008/

Bit of an update:

http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2008/11/07/visual-studio-patched-for-better-jquery-intellisense.aspx

.NET Videos

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

Castle Windsor IOC:

http://gojko.net/2008/11/04/dependency-injection-with-castle-windsor-video/

MVC ScottGu:

http://www.hanselman.com/silverlight/ScottGuAtAltNetConf/

MSBuild-ification doing it from command line - some reference

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms164311.aspx

/p:Configuration=Debug