An Ordinary Man

The problem arises when you have your application compiled for AnyCPU Platform, you are running on a 64bit system and the installed ADO.NET provider (Microsoft ACE.OLEDB.12.0) is the 32bit version. Fig. 1 To resolve the issue, you need 64-bit Windows along with 64-bit MS Office. And download and install " Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable" from here:  http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13255 Another option is to deinstall the 32bit version and install the 64bit version of ACE  from here and then run you application as AnyCPU on 64bit systems. But this could be a nightmare for your deployment scenarios But wait, there is a simple workaround to resolve the issue. The simplest workaround is to change the Target Platform of your 64-bit application to 32-bit through Visual Studio menu BUILD -> Configuration Manager -> Active Solution Platform -> x86 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 ...

Network Load Balancer (NLB) Network load balancing is an excellent feature of the Microsoft Server Family operating systems. It allows the setup to make use of a single IP address to balance the load between two or more machine. In order to utilize the Windows Server Network load balancer, you will need two machines running windows server 2003/2008. Each machine needs to have at least one network card and at least one fixed IP address. For best performance, it is recommended that each machine has two adapters, one mapped to the real IP address and one mapped to the virtual IP address.  This is because, on a single adapter machine, if you configure NLB in Unicast mode then the adapter will be only in NLB use, no other network traffic could use that adapter but if you configure NLB in Multicast mode then all traffic would use that adapter and hence degrade the performance due to load on single adapter. The basic requirements for setting up Network Load Balancing:...