Internet solutions team

I Installed MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server) virtual hard drive which can be found here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=67f93dcb-ada8-4db5-a47b-df17e14b2c74&DisplayLang=en

To use virtual hard disk I installed Microsoft Virtual Server. I was trying to access the Virtual hard disk using virtual server and was using the user name “Administrator” with Password “pass@word1″ which is provided by Microsoft documentation.

I installed all above on my person laptop to explore the MOSS. My Laptop keyboard is UK(English) while the Virtual server installed was using US(English) keyboard.

“@” is on different keys in both UK and US (English) based keybaords.  I tried to loginto MOSS virtual hard disk more then 15 times and was unbale to  log into the virtual server then I started looking for solution over the Internet. I visited many sites but was unable to find the solution but I didn’t give up.

I started reading user comments for all Posts over the internet and I found one line which stating the “@” problem and finally I managed to log into the virtual hard drive.

Conclusion.

If you are not using US(English) keyboard and you download any software from Microsoft site try to use US(English) Keyboard.

I wanted to concatinate multiple address fields as a single field
separated by comma. Here is the solution which is doing job for me.

8000 is the Max length of varchar data type in sql server.
Using COALESCE() function saves  lot of IF or CASE decision logics.
This function Returns the first nonnull expression among its arguments
If all arguments are NULL, COALESCE returns NULL
Substring() function takes 3 arguments here first argument is Address
2 is starting point and 8000 is lenght of charcaters to return. If start it
from 1 instead of 2 then if First filed is null then it will put “,” in start
which definitely is not required. So not to srat with comma I am putting start
from 2nd charachter of the string.
Substring(
coalesce(‘,’ + department_campus,”) +
coalesce(‘,’ + address1,”) +
coalesce(‘,’ + address2,”) +
coalesce(‘,’ + address3,”)+
coalesce(‘,’ + town,”)+
coalesce(‘,’ + county,”),
 2, 8000) as Address