Whew! The title says it all.

I recently had a little problem with my server. Notice the 3 blown caps.

I had my 5 year old daughter take a look. Without pointing out anything in particular, I asked her “Ok, this computer isn’t working right. Any idea why?”

She looked around with a flashlight for about a minute and states “Those 3 batteries look like they’ve gotten dirty. Maybe you need to clean then up?”<g>

So, I’ve got no server as of now.

Fortunately, all my SQL databases I use for testing get backed up every night, so I still have them all. Unfortunately, the SQL Server installation itself was on that blown machine<sigh>.

I’d been wanting to virtualize my server for some time now, so this was the perfect opportunity. I fired up VMWare, cloned an existing XP VM I often use for testing, cleaned it up, put SQL Server 2005 on it, ran the SQL SP2 update, then restored all my DB backups. No problem.

With the VM running on my workstation, I loaded SQL Server Management Studio on my workstation and tried to connect to the virtual server.

(for search purposes, the message is “Login failed for user ‘argos\guest’. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18456)”)

Hmm. I was pretty sure I had things set up right. So I tried SQL Authentication with the SA user and password.

I’m in.

Ok. That’s odd. And why is it trying to connect me as guest? Wait… Originally, my server was running Win2003 Server, so it had DNS setup. With it gone, I’m in workgroup mode. Ah! I didn’t have matching user accounts on this new virtual server and on my workstation. Set up a matching account, and try a remote connection request to the SQL Server from my workstation. Still no dice.

I checked the SQL ERRORLOG file (you can typically find it in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\LOG), and I end up with this:

2009-02-05 16:11:36.36 Logon       Error: 18456, Severity: 14, State: 11.
2009-02-05 16:11:36.36 Logon       Login failed for user ‘ARGOS\Guest’. [CLIENT: 192.168.100.110]

That STATE number is the key. A state of 11 means “Valid login but server access failure” (There’s a really good table of error states here).

That was the clue I needed. After way too much googling, scratching my head and trying random things, I eventually came across this post by Jens Suessmeyer.

The short of it is that, under XP anyway, if you are running in a workgroup (ie non-domain) and you have Simplified File Sharing turned on, this will cause SQL Server to ALWAYS force remote authentication requests to fall back to the Guest user. It was only after I’d found the above post that I came across this MSKB article that describes the problem in more detail.

So, it’s off to the Folder Options dialog, I uncheck the Use Simple File Sharing option:

And, no more connection failures!

So, to sum up. If:

1. You’re using SQL Server 2005 (and likely other versions as well).
2. You’re running in a WORKGROUP environment
3. You need or want to use WINDOWS AUTHENTICATION and not just SQL Authentication
4. You set up a login on your server and your remote machine that exactly match in username and password
5. You’ve enabled SQL Ports 1433 and 1434 through your firewall.
6. You can connect via Windows Auth just fine when you run SQL Management Studio from the server
7. BUT you get a connection error indicating that your trying to connect as GUEST, when you were expecting to connect as your current username.

Then you most likely need to turn OFF Simple File Sharing on the SQL Server machine.

A week or so ago, I decided to try my hand at a little XAML, so I loaded up VS2008, started up a simple project and created a few forms (or whatever they’re called in WPF speak).

Anyway, I hadn’t gotten but maybe 10 minutes in when VS crashed. Hard crash. No error message, or dialog of any sort, just closed out.

I reloaded the project and tried again. Immediate crash as soon as I loaded up any XAML file.

I let it sit over Thanksgiving (I believe it’s always good to give a system a chance to think about what it’s doing before you really lay into it<g>) and tried again today.

No joy.

So I started researching the issue and came across a pretty active thread about just this problem.

Long story short, uninstall Power Commands for Visual Studio 2008 if you’ve got it installed and have VS2008 SP1. It doesn’t look like PowerCommands has changed since April and there definitely seems to be issues with it and SP1.

Like a lot of people out there, I’ve been bitten by the Vista “Slow Copy/Delete” bug many many times myself.

I finally decided I’d had enough today and when looking for a solution.

I came across a couple of posts discussing a hotfix available from Microsoft, but it’s apparently not that easy to get a hold of, and its a questionable fix at that.

Then I happened across a short post in a SlashDot discussion that mentioned turning off thumbnails in the Explorer view.

I’ve never heard of that one, so I gave it a quick shot.

First, open the Folder Options:

Then, just make sure the first option “Always Show Icons, never thumbnails” is checked:

Surprisingly, this does seem to a have a pretty dramatic effect on the copying and deleting processes, as well as noticeably speeding up the time it takes to get from a right-click to actually seeing the right click context menu in Explorer. It’s still not instant like it should be, but it’s better than before.

I’ll keep playing with it and post if I discover any other interesting bits about this seemingly easy workaround.

I realize this is a little late, and almost totally off topic from Visual Basic, but it is a peculiar business decision, if you ask me, which, in a way, has to do with developing VB apps.

Intuit has decided, according to their support staff, that as of this year, if you purchase the CD version or download version of TurboTax (ie, the fat client), you no longer get a single E-FILE for free. You have to pay an extra 17.95 for that privilege.

Now, TurboxTax has always been a pretty good deal in my book, but with the competition in the marketplace now, I can’t see how this is possibly a good idea, other than possibly to drive business to their online offering, which does still offer a free E-File.

Oddly, though, the online version doesn’t have the same “FORMS” mode that the fat client does, thus you can ONLY use their “interview” style format to enter data, which can be cumbersome in many cases. Hence, the two aren’t interchangeable.

I suppose to their credit, they did offer to refund the E-File charge when I complained about it. But by the time their support emailed me back, I’d already printed and mailed my return.

Yet one more reason that FairTax seems more and more like a better idea.

Go there, check it out, and if you agree, and sign the petition.

It looks like I’m not the only person experiencing absolutely terrible performance in VS 2008 when performing what is ostensibly known as a “Quick Find”

This is the dialog you normally get when you do a Quick Find (Ctrl-F).

Note that I typically have it set for Entire Solution, Hidden Text and Use Wildcards.

With things set up this way, on a Core 2 Dual Core machine, I typically see a 2-4 second delay when I click the Find Next button. Pressing F3 to continue the find yields similar times.

And this is when the next occurrence is on the same line of code as the current occurrence!

Not much of a “Quick Find” in my book.

I tried all the various options, and nothing has any effect EXCEPT for the “Look In” option. If I change it from Entire Solution, to, well, anything else, the finds are then instantaneous.

If anyone knows of the cause or solution, I’d love to hear about it. So far, I’ve turned up bupcus on this one.

Till then, the Find In Files (Ctrl-Shift-F) option seems to be the best alternative.