The scenario is you have an application which was installed through MSI. And you only know the application name (in this case, the beginning part of the application name). Using msiexec command requires you to know the product GUID but the application...

In order to search for any Control Panel item, you should not use "Classic View". As an example, if you wnat to turn off UAC (not recommended though), you search for "uac" with the normal Control Panel view and the option should come out. The good...

Other than being a software developer, I am also a magician. Check out this blog post (you will probably have difficulties understanding some of the magic jargons if you are not a magician): http://nnylfmit.blogspot.com/2009/06/no-way-jose.html .

As an employee, I am glad to see our stock price made new high today, while most other IT stocks went lower. The recent strong uptrend of MSFT shows the recognition on the value of Microsoft, at least by Wall Street. Anyway, we just announced Bing and...

Nowadays, we have different choices of script languages in Windows: VBScript, JScript, PowerShell script, etc. Coming from the old DOS world, I still prefer a simple batch (.cmd) script. Say we have a simple sql query and we want to run it every 10...

Re-orgs happen frequently at Microsoft and I am about to experience one. I just got two Ship-Its for the product I have been working on for almost 2 years, Microsoft Equipt , which will be discontinued after April 30th. We just finished the last feature...

Excited about upcoming Summer Olympics? Microsoft brings you a great digital coverage. Extracted from a promotional email : On the eve of 08.08.08 and the excitement around the XXIX Olympiad, Microsoft and NBC Sports have teamed to deliver event...

Log Parser is a great Microsoft tool for processing text-based data. Its scriptable COM components can be easily consumed by .NET applications. Recently I ran into an interesting error when using the COM components with C#. The data input for the parser...

I got an email this morning saying the LIve Maps China was live today. According to the email, this first public release supports most basic map and local search features across China with details for 114 cities, plus a Public Transit feature for 11 cities...

Prior to SQL Server 2008 , SQL developers were restricted to using two types to work with date and time values: datetime and smalldatetime . While they are sufficient in most user scenarios, there are some limitations: 1) Both types include both the...

This post contains some hard lessons I recently learned through a craigslist transaction. Hopefully it could help you to become more cautious if you decide to sell something through craigslist or other similar online sites. A while ago I won a competition...

Here's a list of things to know if you'd like achieve the best performance/scalability with SqlClient: Use SqlBulkCopy to send large sets of data to the server Set DbDataAdapter.UpdateBatchSize to send batches to the server Use strongly typed...

1,000+ participants at 30+ project sites added up to nearly 4,000 hours of service in a single day. Seattle Works Day is a fun and easy way to green up Seattle. Microsoft also broke Seattle Works Day records. We had three projects this year with over...

After working in SQL for more than 19 months, I have decided to pursue a new opportunity in Office Live. On June 1, I’ll begin my Office Live adventure.

Cool product, cool name, cool website. I saw the demo in our company meeting and I really like it. http://www.microsoft.com/surface/ Executive Q&A: What the new surface computing category means for Microsoft and consumers http://www.microsoft...

I'd like to share an interesting article on Microsoft's profits published a while ago: 10 Reinvigorating Facts About Microsoft's Profits ... Microsoft last week announced quarterly revenue of $14.4 billion and net income of $4.93 billion. In...

My mentor James at Microsoft recently started a blog with the name "Progressive Development". It talks about best and worst practices of software engineering in the format of entertaining conversations between two figures Motley and Maven. I knew James...

Last time I wrote a post on MSDTC under Vista. Here I'd like to talk a general MSDTC issue, which is not Vista-specific. Internally MSDTC uses NetBIOS names and passes them to RPC to talk to remote machines. This requires both server and client to...

Background Consider the following two scenarios: 1. You have implemented a .NET application accessing a specific COM+ service with automatic transaction processing. You derived a class from ServicedComponent, set the Transaction attribute for the...

If you don't know what Bedlam DL3 means, I encourage you to read this blog entry You Had Me At EHLO... : Me Too! Yesterday, a similar event happened, in a smaller scale though. Someone sent an announcement email to the Bluehat Alert DL with more...

Under some circumstances (such as with certain network bandwidth), you might get a general network error in .Net Framework 1.1 when executing a query that takes longer than SqlCommand.CommandTimeout value. This has something to do with how SqlClient...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913764/ The KB article didn't say a lot of details about this bug. Usually the following conditions have to been met in order to trigger the bug: 1. Query must run against sql2000 (Sql2005 works fine) 2. The table...

There was a bug in SqlClient which could cause high CPU use. The scenario is a SqlClient application sends an attention to Sql Server but receives no acknowledgement from the server because the connection is broken. The bug lies in the logic of...

Now you don't have to log in in order to make a comment in my blog.

Today Bill Gates announced his transition plans: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13348456/ Essentially in two years, Bill Gates will transition away from a daily role at Microsoft to focus on the charitable work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation...