AJAX Toolkit

The different components included in the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX toolkit can be found here

The toolkit provides different components used to enhance the User experience using AJAX. It is an open source project hosted at the Codeplex website (ToolKit home page)

Web session Timeout issue on IIS 6.0

 

One trick in setting the session time out for Web applications in IIS 6.0.

you may notice that no matter how long you set the session timeout to be, it will timeout after 10 or 20 minutes.

The reason for this is that by default web applications are using an application Pool ( new feature in IIS 6.0 that wasnt there in the IIS 5.0).

The application pool- to save resources- will shut down the worker process after being idle for a certain amount of time( default 20 mins)

It will do so regardless of any session timeout in any web application using this application pool.

 

To change this, Point to the application pool used by the web app in question, right click “properties” goto “performance” tab and under the “Idle Timeout” panel, either change the time period or uncheck the “shut down after…”

SQL Server Meta Data

Recently came across a nice and easy way to retrieve List of Table and Views from SQL Server database.

The idea is to use SQL statement to query some system tables holding the schemas

using

SELECT RTRIM(tbl.table_name) AS TableName
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES tbl
WHERE tbl.TABLE_TYPE = ‘BASE TABLE’

Will get all Tables in a database.

Using “VIEW” instead of “BASE TABLE” will retrieve the List of Views.

 

And to go one step further, we can get details of columns in each table using

 

SELECT *
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS col
WHERE col.TABLE_NAME = ‘TableName’

The will show details of each column ( type, nullable or not, max capacity, ID or not, default value, etc.)

Microsoft’s PowerShell

A revolutionary new way to do command line anc batch files for the windows OS. PowerShell is able to deal with “Objects” rather than mere strings and builds on the .NET Framework 2.0 Objects.

A nice series of webcasts can be found here (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/webcasts/ps.mspx)