During the big Mango update rush over the last 3 weeks i joined the rest of the Windows Phone 7 Development community and excitedly upgraded my phone from Windows Phone 7 Mango Beta to the real thing. I was so eager to upgrade right now that I did so on my work PC where I connect my phone as a Guest. This happily got me up and running (definite thanks to the WP7 team for doing such a great job of the upgrade experience). My troubles only began when i tried to synch my phone at home a couple of days later. Hopefully i can save a few of you the time i spent looking into this.

One of the most annoying things I find when i start working with a fresh installation of Visual Studio 2010 is that when implementing interfaces and base classes using the “Implement Interface X” function (CTRL + period) it inserts those crappy #region tags.

If on your first ever start of Visual Studio you pick a layout that happens to be missing the oober aweshuum “Build configuration” dropdown menu from your toolbar and are struggling to find it in the Build toolbar (i know i was..) here is how you add it back:

MS SQL Server has a habit of sprouting enormous appendages in the form of log files. Like the infamous Tree Man from Indonesia, sometimes this can be a situation that gets out of control. The SQL error log is one of these sources of pain, but there are a few tricks to pull out of your sleave that’ll save the day.

One of the niggling that often happens when your deployed to a cheap shared hosting environment is having your table owners change on you. If you have created a data access layer that references tables using their long name this is an issue. This can be caused by a deployment script not maintaining user permissions on your tables or maybe you’re using a web console to interract with you database like myLittleAdmin and it doesn’t allow you to create a table under any user but your own.

So this may be a post that exists in a million places on the web if you know where to look, however it would appear that whenever i do this a colleague gets the idea that i am channelling black magic. How does one “debug” a mail server connection – this is as easy as 123.