In my post [Multithreading pings and showing them in a grid in VB.Net][1] I got a question from Alex. Hi, What if I want to check 100 ip’s 5 at a time? What do I need to change in the code to accomplish this. I’ve been working on it for several hours with no luck. And Alex was pushing his luck by coming back and asking this too. Will it also be possible to pause/resume checking as this would be handy?

A few months ago, I changed jobs and careers. I moved from a software engineer role to an analyst/project manager role (or, as some of my more technical friends have referred to it – the dark side). I had deliberately sought out this change as I wanted to move away from what had strictly been a coding role to one that was a little more encompassing in terms of working through the entire SDLC – a role with which I was and am far more comfortable and familiar. So far, it has been a very rewarding move and one that has given me more perspective than I would have been exposed to in my previous position.

Tonight I was upgrading some SSIS packages for another blog on automating index statistics. While doing this task, I ran into the error, “Could not find stored procedure ‘sp_ExecuteSQL’". After sitting there, in disbelief that sp_executesql wasn’t on the SQL Server 2012 RC0 instance, I realized the problem was me. I actually just gave the answer to what the issue was. The database that I was testing on was AdventureWorks. AdventureWorks has a collation setting of Latin1_General_100_CS_AS. Latin1_General_100_CS_AS is a case sensitive collation, unlike a more common collation of SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS. So sp_ExecuteSQL is not a valid name. sp_executesql is the actual name of the system procedure and the correct case, all lower case.

If you are a blogger, you want to spend time on writing the content not on formatting tables and prettifying syntax so that it looks nice. The syntax is taken care of because we use the GeSHi syntax highlighter. formatted output is another story If you want to show the output of a query in a html table you have a couple of options. Let’s first take a look at a simple query

Good friend and SQL Server MVP, Jason Strate (Blog | Twitter) put together the meme15 topic. Meme15 is a monthly post that involves topics about blogging or meta-blogging. The monthly event has a ton of value in helping build blogging skills, share blogging experiences and get more bloggers to start up. This month’s questions that need answering are… Why should average Jane or Joe professional consider using twitter? What benefit have you seen in your career because of twitter? Number one is fairly simple in my opinion. Every social networking tool is what you make of it. This goes with an individual’s use or an entire community’s use of the tool(s). Twitter has been around since 2006 (according to Wiki). My account goes back multiple years. I owe thanks to Denis Gobo for getting me into using Twitter. Well, his attempts to. Originally I didn’t use it. I created my handle, watched some people talk about taking showers and eating bacon and said, no thanks. Sometimes they had to go to the doctor for some sort of exam that I really didn’t want to picture or hear about. That was even more frightening when you see some of the avatars they used. After that, I stopped using twitter for a few months. Then for some reason I jumped back on and tried it the way I should have in the first place. I used it as a social networking tool that relates to my business, technology corner and all around community involvement. I had been a part of several .NET and SQL Server Communities prior to twitter but really, twitter is what made it scale both up and out, very quickly. With the expansion of my ability to get involved in the SQL Server Community with twitter, I also had a single and effective place to make my blogs public. Prior to tweets such as, “[Blog] SQL University – let’s blog!” my blogs had only a few hundred hits on a good month. Yes, I said, Month! Once I took twitter in as a tool to get my blogs in front of more people, my visits doubled, tripled and simply hit marks in the thousands. I can now count them in days without feeling no love from the community 🙂 You can’t argue with those types of statistics and free marketing abilities.

I was restoring a TB+ sized database on our staging database today. Someone needed to use a different database but he couldn’t login because the database I was restoring was the default database for the login he was using. I told him to click on the Options button in the connection dialog and specify another database. I guess there was an misunderstanding because he couldn’t get it to work. This means it is time for a blog post.

Some people just have weird ideas and making Basic4Android could be categorized as one of those. Yes it let’s you create android applications using Basic. And how could I pass that up. So I installed the trail version and gave it a spin. So I tried to make a textview that I would change to hello world when the application starts. First thing you get to see when is this screen.

There are four Windows Phone starter kits available for download These starter kits are great to get an app working and to understand how it woks, all you have to do is add your own artwork, make a couple of tweaks and you are ready to go. Below is a link to all of them and a short description of what they do….happy coding Windows Phone Starter Kit for RSS

It’s time for SQL Nuggets! This is a cool idea started by LTD’s own Ted Krueger – a quick SQL-related blog on Fridays. This week’s nugget is “Deciding I need to delete it all and start over again” (and I’d like that with a side of honey mustard, please). A wise Jedi once said, “Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.” What happens when you do, but you do poorly? You do it over.

Ted Krueger tagged me “Deciding I need to delete it all and start over again”. What can I say, during the process of writing this post, I expect to delete it all and start over again at least once! I suspect that most people would think that “starting over” is generally bad. I couldn’t disagree more. Every time I have started over, I always end up with code that is easier to read, more efficient and ultimately has less bugs.