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When you're working with ASP or ASP.NET applications and a Microsoft Access database, you're likely to run into an error like this:

Alternatively, you may get this error instead:

Both errors basically mean the same: the account that your Web server is running under does not have the necessary permissions to read from or write to the database.

This article will explain the steps you need to perform to fix this problem. First I will explain how you can find out the current account that the Web server is using to connect to the database. In the second part of the article I'll explain how to change the security settings so the Web server can successfully access the database.

UPDATE (2005-12-06): The compilation features presented in this article are obsolete. It's recommended that you look at Web Deployment Projects (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/11/10/430283.aspx) instead.

Unlike Web sites created with Visual Studio .NET 2002 or 2003, there is no need to do a full compile of the project whenever something has changed in your site. The new Code Behind feature and the Code directory used in ASP.NET Whidbey allow you to make changes without recompiling. As soon as the changed page gets requested, the .NET FRamework will recompile the page on the fly.

However, it is sometimes useful to compile the application right after you have deployed it. One reason for this precompilation is speed. Another is code protection. A compiled application does not expose its source in the ASPX pages any longer. There are two ways to compile an application at deployment time: In-place compilation and Precompilation for Deployment

When you have installed ASP.NET on Windows Server 2003, you may receive the following 404 - Page Not Found error:

With ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1 many people stored their connection strings in the Web.config file under the appSettings element. But is there a better way to save these settings in ASP.NET 2.0?

Update!! 11-29-2005
There seems to be a problem with the code presented in this article, so don't rely on it work anymore. When you click the print button you get an error and nothing gets printed.

So far, I haven't been able to isolate the problem or come up with a solution. It looks like this problem is caused by some security mechanism in Windows XP Service Pack 2. I haven't tested various versions of IE and Windows XP yet, but I am sure it doesn't run on IE 6, SP2 with Windows XP SP2 (well, it doesn't run on *my* IE 6, SP2 with Windows XP SP2 ;-) )

In some scenario's, it could be useful if you were able to print a page from within the browser, without the Print dialog popping up, and without the user confirming the print operation.

It's often useful to hide certain elements when a page gets printed. For example, your Navigation Menu, or a Search button are usually pretty useless on paper.

This T-SQL snippet allows you to select duplicate records from a database table. The example assumes that the column Id is used to determine whether a record has a duplicate. If multiple columns determine whether a record has a duplicate or not, simply expand the SELECT list and the GROUP BY clause.