I got a question from Amit Vasu regarding the installation of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with SQL Server versus MSDE. The issue was that his customer first wanted to use MSDE and if needed later on migrating to SQL Server.

This is possible and i did some investigation on MSDN and found the following. There is an article describing the migration from WMSDE to SQL Server:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/wss/2/all/adminguide/en-us/stsf17.mspx

After this you have to change the connections in SharePoint Administration of the databases. the following walkthrough describes it:

Open the SharePoint Central Administration website and go to the "Windows SharePoint Services Central Administration". You will find under "Server Configuration" the option "Set configuration database server". Here you can change the configuration database to its new location.

Go to the "SharePoint Portal Server Central Administration". You will find under "Server Configuration" the option "Configure server topology". Here you change the content, component settings and configuration database to their new location.

Its very cool when you debug T-SQL in Visual Studio .NET. Just step from your code into a stored procedure in the SQL Server database. I found some articles at Microsoft about T-SQL Debugging in Visual Studio .NET which could be helpfull to setup your environment.

Setting Up SQL Debugging
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsdebug/html/vxlrfsettingupsqldebugging.asp

Enabling SQL Debugging
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsdebug/html/vxlrfsettingupsqldebuggingenablingsqldebugging.asp

Troubleshooting tips for T-SQL Debugger in Visual Studio .NET
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817178&Product=sql

SQL Debugging: Unable to Start SQL Debug Session
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsdebug/html/vxtbstroubleshootingsqldebuggingsetu
perrormessageunabletostartsqldebugsession.asp

If you know any other articles about T-SQL Debugging please don't hesitate to give a comment on this post. I will put it into the list. :)

Passing a null value to an int is not possible. The int type is mapped to the System.Int32 structure type and is not capable of storing a null value. Only integer values can be stored in there.

There are two ways which i know of how to solve this problem. The first method is using an object in stead of the int type. For example:

object val = 200;

if (val != null)
{
   return (int)val;
}

In this way you can set the val variable to a null value or an integer value. In case of an integer value you unbox the value to retrieve the integer value.

A second method is using the SqlInt32 type found in namespace System.Data.SqlTypes which is a SQL type. This type supports nullable values. For example:

SqlInt32 val = SqlInt32.Null;

or

SqlInt32 val = 200;

I needed some tool to look for keywords, texts or other things by searching through all fields of all columns of all tables of a specific database.

Yesterday was one of those days.... I was working on a project and doing a lot of debugging in SharePoint. At some point the system crashed and I had to reboot. After rebooting the computer it seems that my master database in SQL Server was crashed.