A new ASP.NET MVC project includes preconfigured Membership, Profile and RoleManager providers right out of the box.  Try it yourself – create a ASP.NET MVC application, crack open the web.config file and have a look. 
First, you’ll find the ApplicationServices database connection:

<connectionStrings>
  <add name="ApplicationServices"
       connectionString="data source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Integrated Security=SSPI;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|aspnetdb.mdf;User Instance=true"
       providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/>
</connectionStrings>

 
Notice the connection string [...]

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Ben Griswold on December 31st, 2009

IIS7 introduced the option to run your application pool as AppPoolIdentity. With the release of IIS7.5, AppPoolIdentity was promoted to the default option.  You see this change if you’re running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. 
On my Windows 7 machine, I’m able to define my Application Pool Identity and then create an associated [...]

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Ben Griswold on May 13th, 2009

Let’s say you are viewing results in Enterprise Manager or the SQL Server Management Tools and you really want to update a cell will a NULL value.  Sure you could script it.  Heck, you’re welcome to wrap the one line script in a Transaction and produce a rollback script as well if you’d like.  But, [...]

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I have installed SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server Management Studio 2008 a number of times and it has always been a snap*..until yesterday.
As it turns out, previous installations were always applied to machines (mostly VMs) which weren’t running early versions of the SQL Server and associated tools.  Yesterday, I performed my first upgrade [...]

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Ben Griswold on June 10th, 2008

It is easy to see the subtle difference between the Product Tables below.  The table to the left adds the table name as a prefix to nearly all of the column names. The table on the right represents very simple column names with no redundancy.  Early in my career, I preferred the implementation to [...]

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Ben Griswold on June 2nd, 2008

I very recently posted about using SubSonic to generate my DAL and SSMS Tool Pack to generate the complementing stored procedures.  In response to the post, Jon Galloway asked a great question in the comments:
Thanks for the pointer to SSMS Tool Packs. It looks really interesting. One thing I’m having trouble picturing is the overlap [...]

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Ben Griswold on February 5th, 2008

I sat through an absolutely fantastic presentation on query optimization a couple of weeks back.  The presenter did a fine job of covering many of the basics like SET NOCOUNT ON, minimize cursor use, avoid explicit or implicit functions in the WHERE clause and why not to use the sp_ prefix when naming custom stored [...]

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Ben Griswold on August 30th, 2007

There are a few primary reasons why Windows Authentication should be considered a best practice. Since passwords aren’t visibly exposed in configuration files and credentials are not sent over the network, your systems tend to be more secure.  Additionally, password management (expiration periods, minimum lengths and account lockout after multiple invalid logon requests) becomes a heck [...]

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