Category Archives: Programming

This piece of SQL is perfect for finding which query is running at any particular time, especially if you want to find what it is that’s running very slowly. sp_who2 This should return a list of what’s running, including process … Continue reading →

Everyone’s been either copying and pasting or writing from scratch some code to add “Invite friends” to their Facebook apps, but now there’s a simple tag that they’ve provided. It’s currently in beta and, knowing Facebook, is bound to change … Continue reading →

Whilst trying to backup a SQL Server 2005 database on Windows 2003 I was given an error which said, amongst other things operating system error 5. That didn’t help a great deal, but the resolution was relatively simple: give the … Continue reading →

The “Object reference not set to instance of an object” error in ASP.Net has to be one of the most annoying of all error messages giving, as it does, almost no clues as to what the error can be about. … Continue reading →

The apparently XML derived “500 server error” problem with FCKEditor’s image upload tool and asp.net seems very common, and there seem to be half a million different confusing solutions on the web. In my case, it turned out the problem … Continue reading →

I’ve been trying to build an editable organisation chart for an intranet project and have built up a structure of nested dynamic user controls. This was all working well for displaying the information but wasn’t working so well for posting … Continue reading →

Why are regular expressions called regular expressions? Two regular expressions that achieve the same result can often look completely different, so what’s so regular about that? And also: they’re not even expressive. Who can really understand what /(<[^href]*href=(\"|'))([^(\"|')]+)(\"|')/ does off … Continue reading →