Today I had a request we have all received before. Basically, reverse everything you did on an export job from a database to flat file sources so we can validate pretty much everything. It’s a frustrating request. I have to admit that. I wouldn’t be human if it wasn’t. Really, the data is all there and if we could rely on the user community not making for “interesting data alterations” we could just run these extracts by date ranges over the normal method.
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
Microsoft just announced that Microsoft Security Essentials will be available for download tomorrow. From the press release Microsoft Security Essentials, Microsoft Corp.’s new no-cost, core anti-malware service that helps protect consumers against viruses, spyware and other malicious software, will be available tomorrow, Tuesday, Sept. 29. Microsoft Security Essentials, independently certified by West Coast Labs, is backed by the company’s global security response team and is built on the same award-winning core security technology found in the company’s security solutions for businesses.
I have finished reading SQL Server 2008 Administration in Action by Rod Colledge and below is my review of this book I will start by saying that I truly enjoyed this book. The book is written in a casual way and is not filled with tons of code, concepts are explained well and where needed images are included to help you understand it better. I also like the fact that this is not a 1000 page monster which weighs more than my laptop; it is 464 pages and fits nicely in my bag.
Crossing guards for schools are awesome! As a parent of two boys, I entrust these people with stop signs in hand to ensure my kids (and all others) get across the busy intersections surrounding schools. I honestly feel comfortable knowing that large STOP sign will be throw up any time my children come to the intersection that leads them to school. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of walking with my oldest son to school.
Myself and 52 other SQL Server MVPs have been working on a SQL Server book for the past year or so. All the authors of this book have donated 100% of their royalties to support War Child International. You can visit www.warchild.org to learn more about this charity. You can already pre-order the book from Amazon here: SQL Server MVP Deep Dives or you can get the early access edition from Manning here: http://www.
How can you find out if the columns that are part of the index are sorted descending or ascending in that index? For example when you create the following index CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX ix_test_clust ON test (id ASC, col1 DESC) How would you find out without scripting the index if the columns are in descending or ascending order? SQL Server has a function for that, the name of this function is INDEXKEY_PROPERTY
Just a quickie from the Silverlight front today. Visual States and the VSM are awesome tools to handling most of your application’s animations. One annoyance though, Visual States do not have a .Completed event! Luckily for us, Visual States are composed of Story Boards. Story Boards DO have .Completed events 🙂 To get it to work, it’s really simple. First, create your event handling method: Private Sub SomeStoryBoard_Completed(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.
I kinda like the rdlc/reportviewer reports in VS2008. It is not what you can call high tech reporting but I think it will do everything I need it to do. But the question is do we do reporting on the domainmodel or a separate viewmodel/reportingmodel? Or do we just use datasets and custom sql? Well, I am a guy that tends to use objects, so I like to go the object source path.
The Microsoft reporting engine doesn’t seem to have a barcode control. So there are a few solutions to the problem. Using barcode fonts Not an option for me since this is a winforms application and I don’t like to go around and install those fonts on every computer that needs it. Using a custom usercontrol There are a couple of 3rd party products that claim to have this functionality.
So I’m finally writing a blog post. Not that I’m a lazy guy or anything, but I doubt anyone here wants to read about the stupid things my wife’s cats do or what I thought of the last block buster movie that came out. But I finally have a few things that I think raise to the bar of ‘worth showing other people’. I’ve been lucky, in my current environment I have a pretty loose leash and I get to push different technologies that would otherwise be ignored.