So I’ve had Redgate’s SQL Toolbelt for about a year now, but up until recently I hadn’t used most of the tools available to me. But with the current push we’re making with trying to straighten out our processes I’ve been playing with everything to get a feel for how they work and if I want to actually use them. So far I’ve been fairly impressed with every piece of software provided by Redgate. Here’s my quick review of the SQL Toolbelt

This is a small review of Zero Day: A Novel by Mark Russinovich If you are a windows user/developer then the name Mark Russinovich might seem familiar to you, Mark is of course the guy who started Sysinternals, he discovered the Sony rootkit on their CDs and is now a technical fellow at Microsoft. In other words, Mark knows what he talks about when writing about zero day attacks. So what does zero day mean anyway? Here is what wikipedia has about zero day

I’ve liked and used VB.Net since 2003 and I used C# since about 2005. Me and VB.Net have had a love-hate relationship since the beginning. I love it’s verbosity and expressiveness I just love the syntax. And it just does everything I need it to do for the applications I have to write. I don’t see a reason to leave it behind for something new and different. I hate how they sometimes screw up the syntax, yes lambdas look ugly. The whole version 9 debacle where they implemented lambdas in a half-assed way.

I want to thank the Chicago Suburban SQL Connections user group for inviting me to present! I hopped in the Fit and took a mini-road trip down to Downers Grove, IL on Tuesday, August 2 (with a stop at Mars Cheese Castle along the way!). I gave a preview of my PASS Summit 2011 presentation, Reporting Services 201: From Basic to WOW! The presentation shows you how to take a simple table and make it pop, using report properties, table properties, tablix, lists and charts. It’s a very fun, interactive session and I always learn something new when I give it. The Connections audience was awesome – they had a lot of great questions for me, and were able to help answer each other’s questions as well. I think I was able to spark a desire in a couple people to get started with SSRS, convince a couple people to move from 2005 to 2008, and help people that use it every day already.

Introduction I was asked by Packt publishing to do a book review of jQuery Mobile: First look. And I accepted. I have done this once before for a book that interested me. I don’t read that many technical books since they tend to bore me really quickly. But I got this one for free so why not. And it is a subject I blogged about before. Making a jQuery Mobile style for a PHPBB forum Trying out jQuery Mobile on our blog And about jQuery

Introduction Now that you have all those nice XML comments on your methods and classes and everything else it is time to make them into something no one will ever read but you can use to impress the manager (especially useful in printed format). I will use sandcastle for this. Sandcastle I just installed sandcastle as one would do. Then make your project using the GUI and save it somewhere that makes sense.

Things don’t always do as you expect and testing your code is good for that but sometimes you forget to test the obvious because you just depend on you common sense. Well Common sense tells me all these methods should give me the same result. Module Module1 Sub Main() Console.WriteLine("test " & Test.Test1) Console.WriteLine("test " + Test.Test1.ToString) Console.WriteLine(String.Format("{0}{1}", "test ", Test.Test1)) Console.WriteLine(String.Concat("test ", Test.Test1)) Console.WriteLine(String.Join("", {"test ", Test.Test1})) Console.ReadLine() End Sub Public Enum Test Test1 Test2 Test3 End Enum End Module But I get this as the result.

The argument over table vs non-table layouts has been going on for years. I remember seeing online conversations as far back as ten years ago on the topic, and given my notoriously bad memory that should be taken as a minimum. Along the way we have dealt with partial CSS implementations, inconsistent rendering behavior, slow implementation of standards, competing proprietary implementations…it’s been a long road.

Introduction There are several ways to concatenate string in VB.Net. Most will use the &-operator but [we all know you should use the String.Format method][1]. And sometimes you might by accident use the +-operator. The +-operator is however not such a good idea. Here is why. The problem If you run this little program you will see that the result is not always what you expect. Option Strict Off Option Infer On Module Module1 Sub Main() Dim _I = "1" + 1 Console.WriteLine(_I) Console.WriteLine("1" + 1) Console.WriteLine("1" + "1") Console.WriteLine("1" & 1) Console.WriteLine("1" & "1") Console.ReadLine() End Sub End Module The result being.

Introduction In my last post I made a model plant with 3 attributes, namely name, height and color. Now I would like to add an image to that because that always seems to be the most difficult thing to do. I also decided that it would be a good idea to keep the image in the database, just because I like to be different. And again the guide to read for me was migrations on the ruby on rails guide.