Ok - lets play a game called “imagine” for a bit. Lets imagine you have a database called Postcodes with a table called tblPostcodes which has a list (a very big one) of all the postcodes in the UK with their corresponding eastings and northings. Now you can do some fun stuff like work out how far the addresses in your database are from a specified postcode… Lets setup some variables.

One of the (many) things that I do is various ad-hoc statistical reports on data in SQL databases, so I’m forever churning out weird little SQL routines and cursors with the hope of extracting meaning from data. Here’s a handy little number I put together just recently which counts the number of words in a field in a table. Words are counted individually (the delimiter inside a field is a space).

It seems like the last couple of months I’ve been doing nothing but data cleaning and transformations. As a result, I’ve been having to create all kinds of strange temporary functions to manipulate data to extract the required information. Particularly, date transformations. Of course, different installations of SQL Server (not to mention different database systems) handle dates in different ways - so it’s been important to handle them consistently. This little bit of T-SQL has been very useful in that regard…

Another day, another puzzle. This time, binding a multidimensional array to a Data Grid View Control. Ok, so it would be a lot simpler to just bind the data source directly to the control, but in this case I had to make a fair few tricky transformations to the data. Long story short - how do I dump my data into the grid view control at run time? The solution provided here proved perfect.

So why would you want to get rid of the html hidden viewstate field from your aspx files? My reason was that I was using the gridview control on a page and changing the response.content to excel Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel" to act as quick data extract into a spreadsheet - messy but it works, at least it did in classic ASP. Moving to ASP.NET and adding a form and gridview control drops in the __VIEWSTATE form field which then ends up in the first row of the spreadsheet.

Having had some problems with Outlook working with IMAP mail stores, and having a few computers needing setup quickly, and facing a lack of valid licenses - it seemed an ideal time to have a quick look around for alternatives. And its interesting to see Thunderbird being adopted in the corporate environment. This article being the inspiration for my trial… HowTo: Thunderbird & MS Exchange Server - Download Squad “It is now possible to use Thunderbird at home and work and still get all of your exchange server email as well as your company’s Global Address Book.

Back in ‘98 (henceforth “the good ole days”) I was doing some experiments with LDAP and web based delivery of information. Cobbling together the nascent web technologies of the time to create a, then revolutionary, on-line telephone directory application for AT&T. Reading an article on the fast disappearing TLD TLDs (three letter domain top level domains) I cast about for a suitable candidate for my first registration. It occurred to me that since LDAP was a lightweight version of X.