If you are running into long running opperations inside SQL 2005 Server Management Studio such as building indexes performed through the designers, there is a simple fix.  Today I spent about an hour digging for the problem since it did not follow the connection properties for the timeout and I could not rebuild an index without this timeout which seemed to default to 30 seconds.

After some frustrating digging and not finding the answer to:

'myTable' table
- Unable to delete index 'IX_PrimaryIndex'. 
Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.

I decided to dig through all the settings I could find.  Last place I looked was Tools/Options and on the bottom of the tree “Designers, Table and Database Designers“, which the first option is “Override connection string time-out value for table designer updates“.  Changed that to 120 and no longer had any problem.

It amazes me how I find these things in the first place I should have thought to look,. but I manage only to get there after exhausting everything else ;)

Google has a beta launch of “Google Sitemaps”:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

Sitemaps is a feature of Google to list all the URLs on your site making it easier for Google to index your site.  Not only does it make it easier to index, it allows you to specify where the pages are so that you are insured Google finds all the pages you want them to find.  In addition to setting the location of the pages, you can specify the last date the page was modified, a value to specify the frequency the page updates along with a value specify the importance of the page.

The map is an xml file you put on your sever listing the page info for each page.  Then you tell Google where the map file is located.  One limitation is that you can only specify up to 50,000 pages in a sitemap (up to 10 MB).  If however, you need more, you simply build more sitemap files and use a master siteindex map file to list the different sitemaps.

For large sites this can really reduce the amount of bandwidth spent by the Google crawls!

Here is the blog where I found this tidbit::

http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2005/12/02/432188.aspx