Okay… the rules of debugging are rapidly changing. It used to be that you would fire away using the IDE’s debugger to ty and figure out what was going wrong because you wouldn’t dare trying to search on msdn for the answer, if using SQL Server, books online had such elusive esoteric information that unless you knew the EXACT phrase to search for, you could easily loose yourself for hours trying to find a solution to your problem.
I was playing around with using Forms authentication with SQL Server 2005 in ASP.Net 2.0 and found that the connection would work just fine through the ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool, but when I tried to run the application it gave me the following error: "SQL Server Error 26: Error Locating Server/Instance Specified". After spending an hour trying, without success, to solve the problem, I performed a google search and found the answer straight away. It used to be said that the reason not to switch to using an IDE like SharpDevelop was because it doesn’t have a debugger. I think it might be more accurate that the best reason not to switch would be that you don’t have a good debugger, but that you might also not have internet access to perform a search!
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