Atlas: Rapid Ajax Development with ASP.NET 2.0

Guys, did you hear about Atlas? Once again technology evolves faster that I grasp existing concepts :(

I knew that Ajax is a fantastic technology; it turned out that Microsoft knows it as well :)

See the book: "Foundations of Atlas: Rapid Ajax Development with ASP.NET 2.0"

Using MS Indexing Server to query multiple catalogs

Guys, I've just resolved one of the most difficult errors I ever got. It was partially due to my bad English, though. But it was mostly due to idiots' Microsoft style of software development. Every time, when you start to do something advanced using some MS technology you're finding that it is not really documented and there is no info even on Google - just because no one uses MS software for advanced development... I remember one case when I was told to use Application Role and Connection Pooling with MS SQL Server 2000. We started to get some irregular type of errors; identical queries returned errors first time and work on subsequent attempts. I was happy to guess that there should be something wrong with Connection Pooling, like not releasing some settings... And we immediately found on Google that there is a known SQL Server bug which does not allow using Connection Pooling with Application Roles. No way.

OK. Back to what I found today: We have a simple ASP interface for MS Indexing Server to search some catalogs for some documents. Someone wrote it in the past; I never worked with Indexing Server (I remember someone played with it in ADI; Tom do you remember?) I was told to modify this interface to be able to search in all catalogs. Since I didn't want to rewrite all the pages, I started to read MSDN in hope that Indexing server has a support for doing that. And yes, it does: MSDN says, "The catalog name can be the name of a directory on the local computer. You can specify more than one catalog name by separating each name with a comma." I modified an ASP code making comma-separated list and immediately got "CreateRecordset error '80041827' Mismatch in cardinality of machine(s)/catalog(s)/scope(s)" error. Here's where my bad English didn't allow recognizing a source of error immediately. I started to search Google and MS Knowledge Base for this error - no info. Nothing meaningful at all. I suspect that as usual no one actually used this slightly advanced approach with MS software - as usual. I was going to give up on my attempts and tell my boss that it' snot doable in a short period of time... But suddenly I understood the error: I set Catalog property as a comma-separated list... maybe folders (scopes) should be set as comma-separated list as well. Using Utility.AddScopeToQuery(objQuery, strPath[,strDepth]) with strPath set as a comma-separated list did not help. But applying objUtility.AddScopeToQuery() several times (the same number as a number of catalogs) did help! Hurrah! I found a solution!

An excellent site for ASP, .NET, and ColdFusion developers

Guys, I've just found an excellent site for ASP, .NET, and ColdFusion developers - xefteri.com. I was searching for MS Indexing Services bug description and found this detailed article. But there's much more: articles, forums, etc. It is run basically by one guy!