After my recent service roll-up for Exchange 2010 users who were homed on one of my servers where unable to set their out-of-office replies on. After some quick troubleshooting it would appear that the service roll-up had reset some of the permissions on some of my Exchange IIS virtual directories.

Under certain conditions there are times when you have a machine in your domain that you don’t want to update its DNS A records. These are usually edge cases however the need is still there. I needed to do this recently, so as they say on Law and Order in a robotic Stephen Hawking voice - “These are their stories”

So this may be a post that exists in a million places on the web if you know where to look, however it would appear that whenever i do this a colleague gets the idea that i am channelling black magic. How does one “debug” a mail server connection – this is as easy as 123.

When Chrome was first launched by Google, and the media found out about it, they proposed that Google had Microsoft firmly in it’s sights and was potentially about to start a new browser war, i beg to differ in my opinion on this. Internet Explorer has one major advantage that no other browser has, and for the near future at least, will continue to have: locked in marketshare in enterprise and all new copies of Windows. Internet Explorer will never be crushed. No matter how crap Internet Explorer becomes, it has the (some may say unfair, but i believe that’s life) advantage of already being installed 90% of the time. So who should really be afraid of Chrome spreading its wings? Apple and Mozilla and if you still care: Opera.

There are quite a few built-in stored procedures in Microsoft's SQL Server that can help you troubleshoot database issues and make those long nights less painful. Knowing they exist can be a life saver, so lets take a look.

Today i came across something that from my day-to-day coding i have noticed a lot of my fellow coders at work/play have let slide on their path to .Net Mecca – using the MailSettingsSectionGroup section of the web.config to specify both SMTP server host details as well as they other properties such as user/pass credentials in a central, single, easy to use manner. So I'll take this opportunity to make it as easy as possible for you to use.

For those of you kiddies loving you Windows 7 goodness you may have discovered that from a web development point of view having an Internet Explorer 6 installation without much hassle is a pretty cool thing. Although the fact that you have to launch Windows Xp mode up and can’t use it as a “native” application by launching it from within Windows 7 is a bit of a let down. Let’s fix that :)

Today i was reading a post by Rob Conery in which he discussed both his thoughts on developer productivity in relation to the creation of a new OS project (ASP MVP), and how he may have thought that in some instances hiding behind WebForms and not touching MVC was really just laziness or ignorance mistaken for productivity. Additionally i also read another post by Scott Bellware in which talks about a similar subject, in that developer productivity when viewed in isolation, is really a myth.

Today i found myself wanting to quickly export a dataset to CSV and i didn’t want to bloat of a library that does more than i need. The following method is the result of this need/want.

It seems we live in an age where a lot of things are taken for granted on the web. Alternative spellings of things being offered to us when we search is a common example of this – simply look at Google and Bing’s “Did you mean X?” and you’ll know exactly what I'm talking about. At first though this can be seem quite daunting for the everyday web developer, but luckily Microsoft SQL server is here to save the day!