Note: This solution is not necessarily the best or most efficient solution in all cases.  It is, however, very simple and works with any site - even ones you have no control over.

Problem:

Internal Web System XYZ must be accessed via an ugly URL such as http://randomservername.internalexample.com:8675309/SomeCrazyPath/SomeFile.htm

Desired End… Read more

It seems that many of my projects in the past year or so have required sharing files with external business partners.  I've found that SkyDrive has been quite useful for this purpose.  Here's how to get started quickly and securely sharing files.

Setting up SkyDrive sync:

1. If you don't…

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Say you have a simple data transfer class that looks like this:

Public Class Employee
    Public Property Name As String
    Public Property HireDate As Date
    Public Property EmployeeID As Integer
End Class

Normally to load up this class, you might call something like this:

Dim employee As…

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This is a reminder to my future self for how to quickly start IIS Express from the command-line on 64-bit Windows 7 or 8 assuming you already have IIS Express installed using the defaults.

1. Open admin command line.
2. cd\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express
3. iisexpress /path:c:\YourApplicationRootFolder /port:WhateverPortNumber

Note: You can also specify… Read more

If you feel that the default on-screen keyboard on the Surface RT isn't sufficient, you can enable what I would say is the "pro" keyboard via the settings.

• Drag in from the right hand side to show the charms and click Settings.
• On the bottom of the settings window, click…

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I was able to attend the SQL in the City event in New York this past Friday.  I highly recommend that anyone who can spare the time and travel should attend the next SQL in the City day in your area.  I found it to be a very well put-together… Read more

I recently had the need to script the execution of a command-line utility and thought it would be a good learning experience to try doing it with PowerShell.  The utility would sometimes output to the STDOUT, but would also send its output to STDERR if there was a problem.  This… Read more

I was googling (with Bing AND Google) like crazy for a solution to this, but didn't find one from any of the open resource sites, so I figured I'd blog about my fix for this to help the next poor dev to come along.

I was getting user feedback that… Read more

One annoying thing about SSIS (2008) and some of the other project types in Visual Studio is the lack of an "Open Project Directory..." option on the project right-click menu.  Visual Studio's "Tools" menu can provide a work-around this.
 
Go to Tools... External Tools... and add a new entry… Read more

Use of the PIVOT operator in T-SQL has always been tantalizing yet confounding to me.  It offers the promise of more concise and expressive code compared to a subselect pattern, yet I've always found it difficult to get the code just right so that I could apply it in a… Read more

This presentation gives an excellent overview of the process of upgrading SQL Server 2008 SSIS packages to work with SQL Server 2012 SSIS.  I’m very impressed at the much-improved capabilities for deploying SSIS packages in a less-scary way using package and project parameters, support for SSIS “environments” (“prod”, “dev”, “test”,… Read more

There was a great deal of feedback to my previous post One Way To Insert Many Rows Very Fast From Your .NET Application.

The post focused on the performance benefit of using a single SQL statement with an XML-based parameter to do inserts of many rows to a table… Read more

This is my attempt to explain something that I have wanted to figure out for a long time.  I have read many articles on this very subject but they always seem to fall short for various reasons - generally by including way more detail or complexity than is necessary to… Read more

If you don’t change the version number of your .NET project output every time you create a setup package, you may have found that it’s difficult to have the Setup program reliably uninstall the existing version of your software before installing your update.

Here’s how to add a batch file… Read more

I recently discovered this great little free Visual Studio Add-in that allows pasting text as preformatted strings in VB or C#.

Meaning it will turn this text:

This is line 1.

This is line 2.

To this when pasted:

“This is line 1.” & vbCrLf & _

“This is line… Read more

I just ran into an issue with one of my applications where a SQL statement had updated a status code field to a lower-case status code such as “active”.  We were expecting “Active” in the application and as a result our application began exhibiting odd behavior.  There are a host… Read more

This will be a series of handy hints for people that know SQL and are frustrated by Excel.  I am going to be writing this for Excel 2007 (what I currently have at work) but the tips should work for most recent versions.  The SQL stuff should also work with… Read more

Full disclosure: There might be a better way to do this.  I am not aware of it.

Problems:

1. Maintaining multiple DB environments (Local, Shared Dev, Staging, Prod) means needing to maintain multiple SSIS environments.
2. SSIS packages are tricky to configure using the existing toolset – it’s easy to accidentally use…

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One of the databases that I support reports all money values in both the local currency and US Dollars.  Very often we will do all of our calculations in a table variable using the local currency and then calculate USD equivalents at the very end.

With this methodology, adding a… Read more

Tobias Ternstrom from Microsoft gave a great talk at Tech Ed regarding upcoming features of SQL Server Denali.  His presentation was engaging, funny, and informative!

You can check it out on the Channel 9 site here (72 minutes):

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/DBI318

I have to say that I am very excited about all… Read more