Not long ago, I posed a question to the Stack Overflow community – (is there a) “Good Visio Template (or alternative) for SOA/Distributed Systems?”. Surprisingly, there was only one response! Since then, I have been recently introduced to, of all things, a Java based tool called the ‘Quick Sequence Diagram […]
Programming
322 posts
Earlier in the week I spent some time trying to accomplish what I thought was going to be a trivial task – mapping from a sequence structure to a flat file structure using BizTalk Development Tools. The main idea is to take a looping structure on the left hand side […]
Ever wondered how to configure when you get prompted for user credentials when logging onto a remote system via Remote Desktop (Terminal Services)? Well, chances are that this might come in handy – especially fi you encounter issues which stem from an expired password (hence, the title of this article). […]
Today I received an e-mail which made it past Google’s Junk E-mail protection. It was sent from “Gmail Team” and titled “Google Verification”. As I’ve had to do site verifications for Analytics and Webmaster tools, I took a look at the e-mail. Within half a microsecond, I decided to compose […]
Introduction From time to time, it is natural for us to deploy BizTalk solutions with Assembly dependencies. Usually this is because we have created helper classes (for mapping, or querying) or perhaps it reuses some common logic shared between application suites. Whatever the reason, it can be very handy to […]
Introduction As I alluded to at the very end of 2011, I’ve been spending more and more time with BizTalk 2010. It’s been a little while since I’ve had to support/build/maintain BizTalk artefacts, but it doesn’t take long to reacquire “the groove”. To gently thrust you into the dark underbelly […]
Introduction In December 2011, Microsoft released an early Release Candidate (RC) of SQL Server 2012 (formerly known as codename Denali). There are a bunch of new things in SQL Server 2012 – here’s a list of just a few: Master Data Services Reporting Services PowerPivot for SharePoint Data Quality Services […]
Hi Everyone, Well, it’s nearly the end of the year 2011, and hasn’t it been a doozy? I don’t know about you, but my year has been haywire, to say the least. I started the year living in China, moved back to Australia, set up in Sydney and then finished […]
This is almost too cool for school – a Physicist at a university in Denmark has put together a scale replica of a part of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider – the ATLAS detector. Apparently it took him 81 hours to recreate a 1:50 scale model of the detector, using Lego […]
What is FILESTREAM? Much data is unstructured, such as text documents, images, and videos. This unstructured data is often stored outside the database, separate from its structured data. This separation can cause data management complexities. Or, if the data is associated with structured storage, the file streaming capabilities and performance […]
I’m introducing a new category now – “Tech Meme” – which is going to be used more frequently for short, pithy articles usually highlighting something absurd, such as the following: I was trying to install Server Virtualization templates for Visio, when I was prompted for PIA assemblies: In a funny […]
There are times when you want to get a little creative about your investigative work when it comes to SQL Server. In this case, this is a very short article highlighting some efficiencies in locating information about specific programmatic resources within a database. If you haven’t used the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views […]
Recently I started to use this nifty application called GPS Log on my brand spanking new Apple iPhone 4S. I know what you are thinking: WTF is Rob using an iPhone for? Well, after years and years of failed promises from Microsoft to deliver a stable, functioning mobile phone* I’ve […]
Introduction If you have a copy of Visual Studio 2010 Premium or Ultimate, you’ll likely have a menu in your Integrated Development Environment (IDE) called “Analyze”. Chances are, you might not have investigated the true potential of the profiling tools in VS 2010. This article will demonstrate usage of some […]
Hi All. I’m debating a new article. I’m currently debating whether to spend some time documenting an interesting solution to a fairly esoteric scenario. I’m not sure if it is worth the investment (in my time), so I’m going to throw it open to the community. Give me feedback – […]