Searching for my lost shaker of salt

http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Website-Development/The-Surprising-Truth-About-Ugly-Websites.html

This is an interesting article that resurrects the tech age-old question of form over function.  Why can a plain, ugly website drive more traffic and make more money than one with substantial investment in the presentation layer?  Those of us nerdy types are very interesting in cutting edge techniques, tools, and shiny objects that's its often easy to forget about what it is we are trying to accomplish when doing a website (hello, scope creep anyone?!)

I believe it comes down to a couple of simple principals of focus:

1. Focus.  What is your website trying to do?  (hint: everything is not a good answer).
2. Focus on focus.  Does your website focus on delivering the intention of the website?  (hint: stick to the goal, not the shiny object of the moment).
3. Focus the ^$*@ projector.  Can your audience read/understand/act on what you are trying to do?  (hint: the more flashy the user interface, the easier it is to get lost in the weeds).

For most of my professional career I've always considered myself not-very-good with user interfaces; they are boring, bland, and straight to the point.  However, just because I don't use flash, have bouncing buttons, or know (really) how to use color doesn't mean its ineffective.  Consider one of my oldest websites, www.delphiworld.com.  Straight, simple, to the point.  No flash or frills.  Very easy to navigate and use.  Boring, yes, but also effective.

Simple is good.  So is a good user experience.  But content (and the ability to consume that content) remains king.

The ASPNET configuration website utility will create membership and role schema's into a local SQLExpress database, which is wonderful in many cases.  This is defined in your machine.config file, and therefore the default behavior.  Great!  However, there are manual steps that must be taken in order to set up and configure a SQL Server 2005 database.

First steps involve adding a connection string to the SQL Server 2005 database and redirecting the membership and role provider to use that connection string.  A three part process:

First, add a custom connection string::

<connectionStrings>
  <add name="SqlServer2005" connectionString="data source=MyComputer\SQL2005;Integrated Security=SSPI;Initial Catalog=SomeDatabase;" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
</connectionStrings>

Next, change the providers:

<membership defaultProvider="MMSqlServer2005MembershipProvider">
  <providers>
    <add
      name="SqlServer2005MembershipProvider"
      connectionStringName="SqlServer2005"
      type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider"
    />
  </providers>
</membership>roleManager defaultProvider="SqlServer2005RoleProvider" enabled="true" >
  <providers>
    <add
      connectionStringName="SqlServer2005"
      name="SqlServer2005RoleProvider"
      type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider"
    />
  </providers>
</roleManager>

Piece of cake, makes sense.  However, don't go run the ASPNET configuration website utility just yet or you are likely to encounter an error looking something like this:

Could not find stored procedure 'dbo.aspnet_CheckSchemaVersion'

That's because this object does not exist in the SQL Server 2005 database.  This is what threw me for a bit as I assumed the configuration website would create it the same as it does with SQLExpress.  Instead, you need to run the aspnet_regsql.exe utility from the framework 2.0 directory.  Remember to grant the ASPNET user rights to the SQL Server 2005 database, then run:

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regsql.exe

This will bring up a wizard interface that does what we want it to do, however there are a number of command line options that enable advanced functionality.

After the wizard completes the ASPNET configuration website utility in the manor you would expect, then peace and harmony will return to the universe.

Happy Monday!

And learning more about Microsoft licensing!

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mysterysolved/corp/default.mspx