I’ve been using SynchronizationContext for quite a while now. To me it is the best way to synchronize with the main thread. If you do a lot of winforms development like I do than you will know that you need to do this a lot. Blocking the UI is a nono. SynchronizationContext has 2 methods that are of interest to us. Send and Post. According to the MSDN documentation. 

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by SQLChow (b | t) and the topic is “Automation, how much of it is the same?". As SQLChow noted, automation was a topic a few years ago and now it is being revisited to see if and how it has changed over the years. I know for me, over the last few years, automation has taken a larger role in many of the things I do. I’ve automated many processes over the years using various tools such as SSIS and PowerShell and doing so has not only saved me time but my sanity as well One of the biggest areas of automation for me over the past couple of years has been the automation my installs of SQL Server. Everything from test and production server installs to automating the installation of the SQL Server Client Tools on developers machines and even cluster installs.

It's the second Tuesday of the New Year, so here comes the first T-SQL Tuesday of 2014! SQLChow (blog | twitter) has the honour to host this jubilee edition of the world famous blog party. The theme of this month is the utterly DBA-related topic of Automation. However, it is pretty easy to give it a BI spin. Even we measly BI developers can automate some parts of the development. I'm talking about BIML, a metadata driven markup language (XML for the people that like acronyms) that can generate SSIS packages like you've never seen before. BIML is developed by the nice people at Varigence and an open-source implementation is available in the widely popular Visual Studio add-in BIDS Helper, which you can download for free at Codeplex. This post will not explain what BIDS exactly is and how it works; I already did that in an article series at MSSQLTips.com. You can find those here, here and here. Make sure you also check the very excellent resources I link to at the bottom of the articles. The key point you need to remember is that you can use metadata (data about how and where your data is stored) and some scripting with .NET and XML to generate SSIS packages on the fly.

A little over a month ago I posted the follow quick note on Facebook The second comment I received was from Tom LaRock (b | t), who said… My initial response was essentially “Nope, on my W530” I answered quickly and probably should have elaborated, because Tom’s next comment didn’t surprise me at all. Essentially, what Tom is asking is “Is your presentation highly available?". Tom makes a very good point and it’s one that I recommend all presenters seriously think about! It’s a point that I thought about awhile ago. Sadly I thought about it because no one had asked me a question similar to Tom’s before and I hadn’t thought about it on my own.

In 2012, as my tenure on the PASSMN Board of Directors began, it quickly became apparent to me that “our little club” was quite fortunate. It was rare for us to have difficulty finding speakers or sponsors and when it came to SQL Saturday, the generosity of our sponsors allowed us to do great things. Tack on the fact that we would routinely pull in 40-60 attendees per meeting, and we were living the good life.

Whether you have asynchronous methods in your client-side Javascript, are integration testing against an API, or are using an asynchronous module loader like RequireJS, asynchronous operations need testing too. Jasmine has become my framework of choice for client-side Javascript and I was happy to see the asynchronous syntax get some updates in the 2.0 release. Release Announcement: Jasmine is 5 and 2.0 Jasmine Links: http://jasmine.github.io/ (Google and Bing will both provide the address to the 1.3.1 page if you search for jasmine, the link above is a landing page for both versions.)

I am a bit late with the almost obligatory "How was my past year and how do I think next year is going to rock" blog post – we're already a good week into the new year – but without further ado I present you: How was my past year and how do I think next year is going to rock! 2013 was not a bad year professional wise. I had set some goals and I managed to reach most of them (which is quite a miracle, because I excel at abandoning New Year's resolutions at the very first chance possible). I laid those goals out in the blog post Happy Holidays. I read more technical books. Not 12 like I wanted to, but almost 10. Those books were the following:

In 2013 I took on a slightly different approach to writing by putting more into each article with content, length and defining either what the topic was on or how the troubleshooting methods are taken. This, of course, meant my average blog count per month was way down in 2013 from 2012. In all, only 3.5 blogs per month. In 2012, I was averaging over 7. Value in the content does take more effort though. That is what I set out to manage and I feel the accomplishment was made. This seems to have shown in the number of unique visits and value the articles have provided as well. Just in the last few months, I had 10 articles that blew the 10,000 visit mark away. To me, the number of posts is a cool thing to have but if one article holds more value for a free technology resource over 15 that are so-so, I think I’ve helped just a little more.

A lot of PIM projects start together with an e-commerce project. The e-commerce project will make products available online and to maintain the product information a PIM project is started preceding the e-commerce project. In my previous post “What is Product Information Management?” I explained what Product Information Management is. But who would benefit from such a PIM project? The e-commerce team Since they are in most cases the first requesters for a PIM system, it’s obvious they will benefit from this. For a decent e-commerce site, it’s important to have as much information available as possible. For smaller shops it might be possible to manage this information in Excel or an ERP system, but once your shops starts growing you’ll need something to manage the amount of information

Monitoring a SQL Server environment is one of the many tasks a DBA should be performing on a regular basis. However, you need to know more than “Is my SQL Server still running? Did my backups complete?” You should know what your average performance is over time – baselines. You should be able to get notifications if there is a long-running query, or if a disk is running low on space, or if there is blocking.