Tips

0 words.

30 entries. 7,965 words.

2006-06

  • Avoiding SSIS query timeouts. 2006-06-07. Just so I have a record of this: In SSIS, I was trying to pull data from a SQL Server database with a complex, slow SELECT query (written by someone else) which took a good 15 minutes to run.
    • Technology
    90 words

2006-09

  • Removing Collection Elements During Enumeration. 2006-09-05. Another in a series of random programming tips by Thomas Krehbiel, mostly to help me remember them in the future.
    • Technology
    270 words
  • StringBuilder vs. Concatenation. 2006-09-11. Another in a series of random programming tips by Thomas Krehbiel, mostly to help me remember them in the future.
    • Technology
    226 words
  • String Constants. 2006-09-21. Another in a series of random programming tips by Thomas Krehbiel, mostly to help me remember them in the future.
    • Technology
    638 words
  • Debugging Custom SSIS Components. 2006-09-22. Another in a series of random programming tips by Thomas Krehbiel, mostly to help me remember them in the future.
    • Technology
    210 words
  • Easy SSIS Package Deployment. 2006-09-29. Another in a series of random programming tips by Thomas Krehbiel, mostly to help me remember them in the future.
    • Technology
    121 words

2006-10

2007-03

  • Moving .NET Web Projects. 2007-03-23. I’ve had some annoying problems opening other people’s ASP.NET web projects from Visual SourceSafe. By default, it sets up the local IIS directory in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot regardless of the location of the solution directory. I prefer setting up a virtual directory that points to the actual project location, which for me is on the D: drive.
    • Technology
    664 words
  • Escaping {{Braces}} For String.Format. 2007-03-28. Amazingly enough, I hadn’t run across this situation before. I was writing a quick utility to generate a C# class from a database table today, and I discovered that the following code failed.
    • Technology
    153 words
  • The DTEXEC /DECRYPT option. 2007-03-31. Today’s lesson is about how to avoid those annoying messages that SSIS gives you about being unable to decrypt sensitive data in a package.
    • Technology
    421 words

2007-04

  • Please Don’t Do This. 2007-04-04. Over the last couple weeks I’ve been enjoying a lovely little application that repeatedly polls for xml data from a web service. The main loop of this application looks something like this.
    • Technology
    307 words

2007-05

  • Easy Bot Blocking. 2007-05-07. I’m sure this is well-documented already – in fact I’m almost positive I’ve read this somewhere else, and I’m completely positive that I’ve seen web sites using this technique – but here is a quick and easy way to keep simple bots from posting data to your web site: Add a Javascript “onclick” event to your submit button which sets a hidden form field. Verify that the hidden form field is set correctly and viola, you have a simple test for human vs. bot.
    • Technology
    131 words
  • Parsing Date Strings. 2007-05-23. Very handy information if you ever need to go beyond DateTime.Parse(): Parsing Dates and Times in .NET.
    • Technology
    17 words

2007-06

  • SQL Server 2005 Migration. 2007-06-30. We recently completed a migration from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 at work. Here are some of the issues I’ve had to deal with from an application perspective.
    • Technology
    369 words

2007-09

  • MySQL charset parameter. 2007-09-10. Just in case you don’t know, in order to store UTF8 characters in a MySQL database, you have to add a “charset=utf8;” parameter to the connection string when using the MySQL .NET Connector. Otherwise you will get very frustrated. Also don’t forget to set the field’s character set and collation to utf8 too.
    • Technology
    53 words

2007-11

  • String Comparison. 2007-11-22. There are a bunch of different ways to compare two strings in .NET. Periodically I ponder which one is “the best.” As with most things in programming, it’s largely a personal preference.
    • Technology
    437 words

2008-01

  • Excel Spreadsheet Table Names. 2008-01-08. If you have the unfortunate need to use an Execute SQL Task SSIS component on an Excel spreadsheet, make sure you specify the worksheet name as “[Your Sheet 1$]” in the FROM clause of your SQL statement.
    • Technology
    84 words
  • That Mysterious requirePermission Attribute. 2008-01-25. I started upgrading an ASP.NET 1.1 project to 2.0, and I got this error: “Unrecognized attribute ‘requirePermission’ (C:WINDOWSMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727Configmachine.config line 14)”
    • Technology
    77 words

2008-02

2008-03

  • NAnt MissingManifestResourceException Tip. 2008-03-09. With NAnt 0.86 Beta 1, I found that I couldn’t use the element to include *.resx files in my task. For example, this didn’t work.
    • Technology
    140 words

2008-09

  • Finally != Inevitable. 2008-09-19. For future reference: I had always heard that there were cases where finally blocks were not run. The other day I actually witnessed one of those situations: In a .NET console app, if you hit CTRL-C to exit the application, finally blocks are not executed. Fortunately garbage collection will still handle standard cleanup of objects for you (at least I assume so).
    • Technology
    142 words

2008-10

2008-11

  • Disabling Pluralization in Visual Studio. 2008-11-11. I noticed with some concern that the Visual Studio 2008 designer puts an “s” on the end of table names when it builds LINQ to SQL classes. If you want to disable that, open Tools/Options, go to the Database Tools O/R Designer page, and change “Pluralization of names” option to false.
    • Technology
    108 words
  • CookieContainer, HttpWebRequest and Secure Cookies. 2008-11-20. I ran across a troublesome problem that took several evenings to debug. I couldn’t find a solution with Google so maybe somebody else will benefit from this.
    • Technology
    287 words
  • When It’s Okay To Use C# 3.0 var. 2008-11-21. I ragged a little bit on “var” a while ago, but there are some cases where I think it’s a handy shortcut. Those being when it’s abundantly clear what the underlying type is, like when creating new objects. For example, it makes perfect sense to change this.
    • Technology
    373 words

2009-02

  • Get Microsoft Virtual PC. 2009-02-16. I’ve heard about “virtualization” for years, but I never thought it was anything I needed to worry about. I just thought it was something for network engineers to tinker with in big, expensive data centers. It turns out there are plenty of handy uses for virtualization, using Microsoft’s Virtual PC, in your everyday computing life.
    • Technology
    377 words
  • How to Rename a Windows Service. 2009-02-17. I came across a situation where I wanted to rename a Windows service that had already been installed. (In this case I wasn’t able to rebuild the application to alter the service installation properties, which would of course be the ideal solution.) Google was spectacularly unhelpful, so this is how you do it.
    • Technology
    164 words

2009-03

  • Development Software I Use Now. 2009-03-01. I’ve setup a new development PC, so I thought it was time once again to review the software I normally install and use for development (I last did this in December 2007).
    • Technology
    254 words

2010-09

  • The Importance Of The Robots NoIndex Meta Tag, Or: What’s The Opposite of SEO?. 2010-09-16. I’m not much into SEO (search engine optimization). It’s a booming industry for some, but I still have this crazily naive idea that good content will just naturally rise to the top of search results. That said, there are a some basic SEO guidelines that I try to follow on my site.
    • Technology
    480 words

Just so I know, this is a list template.