How To Enable DB Mail in SQLEXPRESS 2008

By default SQL Server Express 2008 does not have DB mail enabled so you can't use the sp_send_dbmail stored procedure. You may have been getting the SQL Server blocked access to procedure 'dbo.sp_send_dbmail' error.

Quite a few articles I read, said that you can't use it - well - that's not strictly true! It's all there, it just has to be enabled :)

After I did this, SQLExpress was emailing just fine!

In Management Studio (SSMS), right click the server you want to enable DB mail on and choose Facets. In the View Facets pop-up choose the Surface Area Configuration option in the Facet dropdown. Then choose True for the DatabaseMailEnabled option.

Once you have clicked OK, you need to restart the SQL Express server (right click it and choose Restart).

The slightly more complicated part is that you now need to enter the data that other versions of SQL Server let you enter via the interface. So here goes:

1. Expand the tables > system tables in the msdb database
2. Create a mail account in sysmail_account
3. Create a profile in sysmail_profile
4. Match the new profile to the new account in sysmail_profileaccount (use the IDs from step 2 and 3)
5. Create a mail server for the new account  in sysmail_server (the server type will probably be SMTP, but check in sysmail_servertype if you are unsure)
6. Refresh the msdb DB, by right clicking the DB and choosing Refresh

Hey presto sp_send_dbmail now works :)

Validate .ics Calendar For Google Calendars

Somebody recently tried to share a calendar they have in Microsoft Outlook with me by using a webcal .ics link. Adding the calendar to Google calendars is quite easy (see the screenshot below - make sure you swap webcal:// for http://), but Google is very picky about making sure the construct of the calendar is valid - unlike Outlook!

So if you need to find out why Google calendars won't load it, use this great ics validator tool.

Adding the calendar:

Run Single Instance of .NET Compact Framework Application

A .NET compact framework application I work on, in some cases, seemed to have multiple instances of itself running at a time. Although the framework handles multiple instances from being loaded, it can't handle it if the call to load is in very quick succession of each other.

I hunted around a came across this useful (and novely narrated) video article on MSDN.

The only addition I would make to this, is that VB.NET does allow the use of the Using statement in more recent versions of the framework.

Process Different File Types with PHP in Plesk

So after having got PHP to process different files types in IIS7, the Plesk version of the site and using the .htaccess was giving me some grief. I came across this article on the parallels forum and got it work  by using a slightly modified version of the working example given.

AddHandler php-script .js


I needed PHP to process JavaScript files.