So you want to know if that SharePoint 2010 Web Application is configured with Claims Based or Windows Authentication?

The place to do this is via Central Admin -> Application Management -> Manage Web Applications. Then click on the Web Application and click on Authentication Providers in the Ribbon under the Security Section. BUT you might find that this icon is disabled like this screen shot.

Not to worry as you can enable it using one of two methods. One is to disable UAC via Control Panel but that's not really something you want to do. The other option is to Run your Browser as an Administrator like shown here.

Now you will see that the icon in the ribbon is enabled as shown here.

Now simply click the icon and you'll see something like the following 2 screen shots.

If you want to CHANGE the authentication type then you will need to do that via Power Shell which I will explain in another post.

I came across this very cool widget today!

The Microsoft Translator web page widget allows you to bring real-time, in-place translation to your web site.
http://www.microsofttranslator.com/widget/?ref=MSTWidget

It is a pain to set the default browser in Visual Studio UNLESS you use a brilliant tool like this.

WoVS Default Browser Switcher
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/bb424812-f742-41ef-974a-cdac607df921/

If you want to copy the contents of a Results window from inside Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio AND include the Column Headers then you need to set the following via Tools -> Options.

Query Results -> SQL Server -> Results To Grid -> Check the box next to "Include column headers when copying or saving the results".

Note that you will need to close your current session and open a new one before this change takes place.

This is how to list all tables in a SQL Server Database with one statement, or two.

--Tables by Rows Descending Order
SELECT sysobjects.Name,
       sysindexes.Rows
FROM   sysobjects
INNER JOIN sysindexes ON sysobjects.id = sysindexes.id
WHERE type = 'U' AND sysindexes.IndId < 2
ORDER BY sysindexes.Rows DESC

--Tables by Table Names
SELECT sysobjects.Name,
       sysindexes.Rows
FROM   sysobjects
INNER JOIN sysindexes ON sysobjects.id = sysindexes.id
WHERE type = 'U'AND sysindexes.IndId < 2
ORDER BY sysobjects.Name

Have you ever wanted to clear the list of Projects from the Start Page in Visual Studio? Here's how to do it.

Run --> RegEdit  and navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<your version>\ProjectMRUList.

Delete the entries that you don't want.

You can also remove the recent list of files by clearing entries in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<your version>\FileMRUList!

One more thing to mention. If you get those annoying Project names like Project (2), Project (3) and just want to start over then you can do that be deleting the folders in My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\. Usually these folders will only contain the Soluntion (*.sln) files.

Happy Programming!
Dave

Today I ran into more issue when working with deployment of my very first Web Part using Visual Studio 2008 on a 64bit Windows 2008 OS. One important tip when trying to deploy using a SharePoint WebPart for within Visual Studio as that you MUST add the VSeWSS user to the Sit Collections Administrators list. By default that will be just the Primary and Secondary admins of the Site Collection.

Note that you will probably only run into this issue if you have installed Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, v1.3 WITHOUT first creating the VSeWSS Application Pool. Please refer to the Release Notes as it will explain how to add the VSeWSS local user to all the required groups.

CAUTION: if you come across a post on the web that tells you to run this comment, then be VERY CAREFULL as it will knock-out your 64bit WSS SharePoint Web Applications if that's what you have: cscript %SystemDrive%\inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs set w3svc/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 1. Only Enable 32-bit on the VSeWSS App Pool.

Hope you have as much fun as I did, but it is great when I was finally able to deploy from within Visual Studio. 

I was trying to run "aspnet_regiis -ga domain\user" from the command prompt today, but it wouldn't work! I was trying to add calsvdafran03\VSeWSS local user to IIS 7.0 on Windows 2008 Server so that I could take advantage of Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, v1.3. The 64 bit version that is. Anyway, I ran into difficulties running it and then discovered that I had to navigate to the C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727 directory in order to successfully execute the command.

This is how to query an Oracle database for Table and Column information. Obviously, you can change these statements to work for what you need.

SELECT  TABLE_NAME
FROM USER_TABLES
ORDER BY TABLE_NAME;

SELECT U.TABLE_NAME,
           U.COLUMN_NAME,
           U.DATA_TYPE
FROM USER_TAB_COLUMNS U
WHERE U.TABLE_NAME = '<Table Name>'
ORDER BY U.COLUMN_ID;