If you ever wondered why your query is taking so long – or if you ever stared blankly at the weird execution plan – or just curious to know why sometimes “estimated number of rows” is far off the actual – this article is likely to  help.

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Comments to Eric Lippert's post made me think about a common design pattern that does not seem to have language support. The pattern I will describe shortly is somewhat similar to the Decorator pattern, but differs in a sense that Decorator is about adding...

This is the post I have deleted by mistakenly clicking "Delete" button in the msdn blogs control panel. Simple "Are you sure?" pop-up would be nice. Or "undelete" link. Or the list of "recently deleted items". Nothing of the kind exists. I am lucky to...

In the last year or two we are witnessing an explosion in the "distributed storage solution" space. Hundreds of articles and blogposts are published every month week. Here is the very typical one: Is the Relational Database Doomed? After reading many...

Until today, I didn't know what iSCSI is or even that it exists. Today I had an opportunity to read some wikipedia and play with an actual implementation. iSCSI in a dumbshell We all know that hard drives differ by the interface they use to connect...

Follow-up to previous post . This article describes number of techniques for avoiding locking overhead. The first, and by far the most important, technique eliminates locks on reads. The second technique builds on the first in a trivial way by using...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163744.aspx For a lock to provide mutual exclusion for a region of memory, no writes to that memory can occur without entering the same lock. In a properly designed program, associated with every lock is a region...

Very good one: http://blogs.msdn.com/craigfr

This is a test of the msdn blogging functionality rather than anything else. To make it not completely useless, here is a link to C# 3.0 specification . Don't ask me why the chapter number is 26 and what was in other 25 chapters, because I have no idea...