I wanted to take an opportunity to highlight this fantastic blog post a friend and colleague of mine wrote on Feature Toggling. Continue reading
Being a Full Stack Developer vs a Specialist
I was recently asked by Be IT Resourcing to write a guest blog post for them on the benefits, or otherwise, of being a full stack developer versus a specialist. You can read my thoughts on their blog or below, whatever you fancy. Continue reading
Resolving SourceTree Merge Conflicts with Visual Studio
I’m currently working with a company where Git is the source control repository of choice and SourceTree is the tool to handle the interactions with the repository.
Until now I’ve been a Team Foundation Server guy, and before that a Subversion guy, and before that a Visual Source Safe guy so I’ve always (with the exception of Source Safe) enjoyed working with those repositories via Visual Studio. Personally I really like the merge Window in Visual Studio. I know it and I’m comfortable with it so I like to use it. Continue reading
Downgrade a SQL Server 2014 database to SQL Server 2012 or below
After an almost catastrophic 48 hour downtime with my existing hosting provider I decided to move my business, which involved moving a number of websites and their corresponding databases to my new hosting provider.
Now, the thing that I liked about my existing provider was that they supported SQL Server 2014. My new one doesn’t (and neither do a LOT of providers for some reason), so this meant having to downgrade my databases from SQL Server 2014 to SQL Server 2012. Continue reading
Sql Commands in a Visual Studio Transact SQL Script
Enabling SQLCMD in a Visual Studio Transact SQL Script
So it’s pretty simple but, for some reason, the posts on MSDN that I initially read didn’t include this small but immensely important step. Continue reading
How to export CSV data from SQL Server with when required quote encapsulation
A bit of a lengthy title that one but I couldn’t think how to limit it without losing the purpose of the post.
So, this post is all about how to go about exporting CSV data from SQL Server with data encapsulated within double quotes when it is required. Continue reading
How to target SQL Server 2014 from a Visual Studio 2013 SQL Server Database Project
I’ve just installed SQL Server 2014 and want to check what might break in my current SQL Server 2008 database when I upgrade it.
Thomas LaRock has written a great article providing a list of a dozen things to check before upgrading and I would definitely suggest making this your first port of call if you’re planning an upgrade. Continue reading
Searching for Text in SQL Server Stored Procedures, Functions, Views and more
I do a lot of work in SQL Server and one of the things I dislike the most is trying to find all instances of a specific piece of text in Stored Procedures, Functions, Views, Triggers, Constraints etc. Continue reading
Adding “unknown” file types to your publication package
I’ve been making some updates to a web services project recently (I say recently it was actually months ago but for some reason I haven’t managed to publish this post until now) and the time has come to deploy it to a test environment. This in itself brought a few challenges but the one that I want to discuss just now is the issue of including unknown file types in your publication package. Continue reading
Mouse Lag With Citrix Windows 7 Remote Desktop
This isn’t something I’d generally blog about but this issue had been causing me problems when connecting to a physical desktop based within my client’s network. Whilst working with the keyboard wouldn’t provide any sort of issue the mouse would be unusable as whenever I moved it the pointer would literally take around 5 seconds to move across the screen. Very annoying. Continue reading