Log4j includes an SMTP appender that can be used to send logging messages via email. As of log4j 1.2.16, this built-in appender has the ability to send messages via Gmail. Here is an example log4j configuration that uses Gmail to send logged messages: log4j.rootLogger=DEBUG, gmail log4j.appender.gmail=org.ap... log4j.appender.gmail.SMTPPr... ......

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I was recently working on creating a custom configuration section (deriving from ConfigurationSection) to provide some configuration metadata to an app I’m working on. In creating a ConfigurationElement, I wanted to validate that one of the attributes of the element was a valid value for the application. While looking at the example here I noticed the ......

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I've been trying to get NCover to run successfully on Vista Ultimate x64 on and off for the last month. We're still using one of the free versions of NCover available from here, so there is no built-in x64 support. I came across this post today that mentioned using corflags to set the 32BIT flag in both NCover and your testing application (the post ......

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There is a discussion occurring on the ASP.NET forums about passing data to Master Pages using ASP.NET MVC. I couldn't figure out how to post code in the forums, so this post contains an example of the solution I am currently using. I defined a "container" class that contains the data for the specific view and the data needed by the master page. It ......

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I've been playing with the National Digitial Forecast Database (NDFD) provided by the National Weather Service. You can retrieve a forecast via a SOAP web service by providing your latitiude and longitude and a few other details. The web service worked fine when I called it from Python, but I was getting an error when calling it from .NET (using the ......

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Well, after a relatively short CTP, SQL Server 2005 SP1 has been released. This should be pretty cool, since the CTP solved the problems I was having with Import/Export. [Found via David Hayden] ......

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This is actually pretty basic, but I had a hard time with it this morning, so I thought I'd share how to do this. I created a host and host instance on our BizTalk server specifically to host the receive locations we are running. Creating the host and instance was no problem, but I had a hard time changing the receive locations to use the new host. ......

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The SQL Server 2005 SP1 CTP is available for download.  I'm going to be trying it out immediately since one of the included fixes is for the problem I was having with the Import/Export wizard.

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We back up our SQL Server databases to a central storage machine using UNC paths in the BACKUP statement (BACKUP DATABASE db1 TO DISK='\\storage\Backups\db1... For a while, backups were failing with the message: BackupDiskFile::RequestDura... failure on backup device '\\storage\Backups\db1\db1.... Operating system error 64(The specified ......

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We have a web service that is exposed on the internet but is only used by our client application. The client uses SSL to connect to the server and we are using WS-Security to provide authorization. Even so, I wanted to prevent someone from viewing the interface of the service by going to the default WSDL generated by ASP.Net (http://domain/Service.asmx... ......

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I struggled with this a while back and finally came up with a solution that works. There are a few things that I would do differently now (I'll try to highlight them below), but I've been running this for a few months now and it produces correct output so I'm happy. My previous experience with NAnt involved using the <solution> task which works ......

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Now that the release of VS2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 is imminent, I'm able to justify more time at work for reviewing its impact. This list of breaking changes for 2.0 is definitely useful in that regard. I think one of the most important changes is the fact that unhandled exceptions will now always end a process (search for “Unhandled exceptions ......

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Geoff Appleby posts a link to a Microsoft support page that can tell you what DLL came from what package.  Very cool.

Where'd that DLL come from?

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This is a bookmark for myself as much as anything else, but here is Raymond Lewallen's script for generating a text based dependency report for a SQL Server database.

Sql dependency report from query analyzer

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One thing I forgot to mention in yesterday's post: it is possible to have SQLXML do the conversion from Base64 to binary using an updategram. When using an updategram, it is possible to specify a mapping schema, which lets you use attribute names in the updategram that are different than the column names in the table. A mapping schema also lets you ......

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