These represent the “white space” characters such as the space, tab, carriage return etc.

How to turn it on or off:

1. You can press the key combination CTRL+E, S (can be different if you have modified). OR
2. Select: Edit » Advanced » View White Space

It’s actually a helpful feature to examine a code file to see what the white space consists of (tabs or spaces). But it can be annoying to keep the feature always turned on.

It has happened at least 5 or more times for me and I always forget what I did the last time to turn it off

I decided to post about it so that someone (including me!) can find this and remember what to do to turn it off (or on).

Hope this helps

Reproducing the problem:

Right-click on a table and generate a CREATE TABLE script from SQL Server 2005 Management Studio:

Paste the generated script in SQL Server 2000, Query Analyzer and verify the syntax by clicking on the “Parse Query” tool button or press CTRL + F5:

Query Analyzer would report syntax errors:

You will get a load of “Incorrect syntax near ‘(‘ ” or similar errors depending on the number of table queries you generated.

Solution for people who manage the target SQL Server 2000 database using SQL Server 2005 Management Studio

I found this solution when I Googled: http://www.waynejohn.com/post/2008/03/21/Scripting-a-SQL-2000-Database-from-SQL-2005.aspx

But note that Wayne John, the author of the blog says he couldn’t find the “Scripting” section in the “Tools –> Options” dialog box in one of his systems, where he had only SQL 2005 installed!

The solution for people who don’t have SQL Server Management Studio installed at the target to manage the SQL Server 2000

So If you are like me… using SQL Server 2000 + Query Analyzer at the target server while the source is a SQL Server 2005 + Management Studio, you can use the good old SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard to export schema.

The queries generated using the SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard worked perfectly with SQL Server 2000′s Query Analyzer (though a query for even a single table would look scary!).

But make sure you select “SQL Server 2000″ as the value for the “Script for target database” property in the “Select Publishing Options” in the wizard.

NOTE: Double-check the “Drop existing objects in script” option to make sure it has “false” (unless you really want to drop objects)

There are plenty of other tools out there too, for example from Red Gate Software. But as a free piece software SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard offers enough for my needs of exporting schema and data from/to SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000 databases.

What happens if a user forgets the password?… simple, just goto the password recovery page and answer the security question and get the new password in the email.

But what if he/she doesn’t remember the answer for the security question???

Well, this is what happened exactly today. Although there were some solutions on the net, they required you to create a temporary Membership provider in the config etc.. which I didn’t like doing.

But for my joy, I found this post that gave me the idea. Although it is not a clean solution to the problem, it was what I wanted for the urgent need of resetting the password (since this won’t happen too often)

The post says that you have to replace the password hash and salt with the password hash and salt of a user whose password you know! What a simple idea. Well, whose password do I know?? mine of course!

So this is what I did:

1. Changed my password to something like password_999
2. Replaced the user’s (who doesn’t remember the security answer) password hash and salt with my hash and salt
3. Changed my password back
4. Gave him ‘password_999′ as the password, which he obviously will have to change once he logged in

A more hassle-free solution would be to always have a dummy user account in the Membership database, which we can keep locked or as unapproved. And to make things even simpler, we can deploy an admin’s page that can accept the user name and replace the password hash and salt (copied from the dummy user account)… thanks to Tim Huffam

We thought it is something to do with the default culture set in the PC (it was dutch). But the culprit seemed to be the SQL query used. But how come the same SQL query with the same database works in one PC + SQL server and throws an exception in another PC + SQL server? (the databases are identical)

Since there was no difference in the application, query, and database the only thing that was different is the SQL server. I tried the query in query analyzer and saw that the following exception was thrown against only one SQL server:

Server: Msg 8623, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Internal Query Processor Error:
The query processor could not produce a query plan. Contact your primary support provider for more information.

Even though I found some Microsoft knowledge base results when Googled, unfortunately the KB articles are not showing up in either Firefox or IE (its like that recently, didn’t check on it yet). Finally found this article in KBAlerts.com that shed some light on the problem… missing service pack!

Moral of the experience? Google it first!