Actually DATEDIFF will work for finding the different between two dates. See BOL for formatting.

For the programming, most C# books should show how to work with a result set. As far as stored procedures, try this: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/sburke/introductiontostoredprocedures.asp

For licensing, you can freely redistribute MSDE for...

Interesting problem. I think what you want to do is loop through a series of departments and call a DTS package to email the results. At least that's what I'd...

Target Server issues: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/sjones/killthattarget.asp

Did you change the IP on the server? SQL Server listens on startup for the ports and responds accordingly. It doesn't affect the server starting. Something else changed. Read the...

Check to see if the TCP is disabled in the Networking settings for SQL Server. It might have been removed and you can add it back. Also the XP firewall...

Suggest and it shall happen

sometimes.

It's been removed. The forum software didn't come with remove and so it's one of those items on the list to get fixed.

Which VPN? I'm not sure the overhead is substantially worse in one v the other. I'm sure a hardware VPN works better than PPTP in software, but bandwidth is likely...

As far as that setting, you'd need to do some testing to see what works better with your system. I'd test the performance of some procs with the settings at...

create view myview as select field1 from tableA

I assume you're using Text for the notes and some type of character field for the chapter.

If this is in Word, either write some parsing routine in VBScript/Vb.NET, C#, etc....

I think it's a wash as well, but you could argue that they do go in two different fields because you want to require them. The time wouldn't be required...

I tend to work as Patrick above, but if there is a shared server, usually developers don't have rights. Not to be a pain, but keep track of what's changed...

I do not believe that info messages are sent with this command. I tend to issue the shrink in small chunks in case I need to cancel it.

This could be the problem: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;271223

Do you now have the ldf? Did you detach the db?

You can also try this: http://eai.ittoolbox.com/groups/groups.asp?v=SQL-SERVER-L&i=424438