Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Fetch the visitor's IP address using Request.ServerVariables("REMOTE_ADDR") [in ASP & ASP.NET] and use one of the many IP address lookup databases available on the web, some of them for free . The price of these databases may vary depending on the accuracy, frequency of database updates, features it offers like Region/State, City, Latitude, Longitude, ZIP Code, Domain Name, Time Zone, Connection Speed, Proxy (including anonymous and open proxies ) detection and may run into hundreds of dollars.

I have been taking a course on SQL Server 2005 Transact-SQL and having already worked on SQL Server 7 & 2000, I was keen on knowing what new Transact-SQL features SQL Server 2005 offers. With help from other online resources as well, I have summarized the key enhancements for quick reference - TOP — Row count based on an expression. TOP can also be used with INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. OUTPUT clause with DML Commands - to determine the changes from an INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE PIVOT/UNPIVOT - to create crosstab queries TRY-CATCH - for improved error handling Ranking Functions [ ROW_NUMBER(), RANK(), DENSE_RANK(), and NTILE() ] - ranking adds an extra value column to the resultset that is based on a ranking algorithm being applied to a column of the result. DDL Triggers - fire when CREATE, ALTER, or DROP statements are executed, useful for auditing Common Table Expression (CTE) - to create recursive query expressions TABLESAMPLE clause - lets you efficiently sample pages from ...

When you are out to buy a technical book either online or at a bookshop by spending a considerable amount, it helps to check beforehand which are the best selling books on that topic and how well they compare with the others. A fair indicator of the popularity of the book is the Amazon Sales Rank and also their customer reviews and rankings. Philip Miseldine 's article shows how you can consume Amazon's E-Commerce Service(ECS) to build your own web application that gets a snapshot of all the vital details using Visual Web Developer 2005 Express or even Visual Studio .NET 2003.