Problem: SSIS 2005 (actually, Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence Studio) crashes every time you click on an OLE DB Source to edit it. (there are probably similar errors for OLE DB destinations).

Solution: oddly enough, synchronize a few DLLs:

Version of the assemblies ‘msmdlocal.dll’ & ’Msmgdsrv.dll’ must be the same of the ones installed into “%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\” and the ones installed into “%ProgramFiles%\Common Files\System\Ole DB” location.

If it is not same for any or both of these DLLs, then replace the ones in ‘PrivateAssemblies’ with the ones from ‘ole db’.

Hat tip: Calculation tab not working – SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services

Problem: You have an ASP.Net web service/site that needs to access network resources, and IIS is running in a service account that you do not want to have access to those resources.

Solution: Create a custom network account and setup a separate application pool. Microsoft article How To: Create a Service Account for an ASP.NET 2.0 Application outlines some pros/cons and gives a few alternatives, as well as giving the basic instructions. However, I found that these instructions had to be modified with inclusion of a few extra security rules. Steps:

Here’s a really dumb scenario that will illustrate a point about the usefulness of the “red, green, refactor” approach to testing and coding. Here’s the functionality – need to test whether or not a string has a value other than 1. Let’s say I write a method before any tests: