Network Programming in .NET

The Microsoft Windows Update KB2463332 makes your SQL server 2005 inaccessible during installation

If, you’ve got a situation where your database needs to be online 100% of the time, then take care when installing this update, and make sure you’ve got a backup in place.

The error message reported from SQL server during installation is:

A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 – Could not open a connection to SQL Server) (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 53)

– It works fine once the installation is complete.

Ever since Google withdrew it’s search API, a way to automate search engine queries has fallen on Bing, and it’s obliged with the bing search API. You’ll need a Bing search API key before you can use this, but the process is automatic and free.

Unlike the old Google search API, the search result set is limited to 50 results per query, however, the query can be re-run with different offsets, and the result set concatenated.

A live demo of this can be seen at http://bing.freetextuk.com – Which returns a CSV of 300 results for any Bing query. The search box is pre-filled with a sample search to find link directories in spain (ending in .es).