Big decimals getting you down? Vardecimal is coming to town! OK, I couldn't come up with a smarter way to begin this post. But if you have I/O bound operation in SQL Server in tables with many decimal/numeric values, you owe it to yourself to read...

With the recent release of Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" Beta 1 , folks now have more recent bits with which to take a look at what's coming for the ADO.NET Entity Framework. The Virtual PC downloads take a while, so in the mean time I can recommend...

Or, rather, it can take more work than you'd think at first. I was thinking about this as I read Jeff's post on Apparently Bloggers Aren't Journalists . I always think I should blog more frequently, but I'm very weary of "me too" posts or making mistakes...

After my DataView.RowFilter post , the next obvious step is of course a short post on using the DataView.Sort property. This property is simpler, as it simply takes column names, with a possible ASC or DESC modifier. You cannot use expressions directly...

I always found the text layout on the DataColumn.Expression page a bit odd. So, in the spirit of my last post , I decided to go ahead and do something similar for it - here is a reformatted version, which will print out in columns and should fit on a...

So, I've been doing a bit of work with System.Reflection.Emit lately, and I've found that just having the list of the OpCodes fields around is pretty useful. I navigate to the page, but there are really a lot of opcodes, and I keep scrolling back and...

If you've already boarded the Vista train, here is a very nifty addition to make to the Search bar: Search++. http://brandonlive.com/startplusplus/download/ I'm now enjoying some play phil collins while I write this - the commands and their usage...

Often in the forums we see questions about having SELECT-like functionality on local data (that is, on a DataSet, without accessing a database). There are a number of operations that the ADO.NET classes can perform on the client which are often good...

Go get all the goodies at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/servicepacks/sp2.mspx , including an updated books online (BOL) and feature pack (lots of good stuff, including JDBC drivers, MSXML 6.0, command-line tools, SQL...

Not that I'm an expert on Outlook or anything, but this helped a friend of mine and I thought I'd pass it along. If you have a better way of troubleshooting this, feel free to leave a comment! OK, so this is what happened: my friend tried to send an...

You can find the first part of what promises to be a very educational series over here: http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2007/01/30/entity-data-model-part-1.aspx . One of the things that I love about this technology is how crisp it is about defining...

You can use the spell-checking functionality provided by the RichTextBox to quickly correct those pesky typos! Just navigate to something like the following, and you're done. <DockPanel xmlns=" http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation...

Wicked cool application at http://www.bl.uk/ . The application allows you look at two notebooks from Leonardo da Vinci (the original stuff!), plus a few other very interesting, precious books. All powered by WPF - note that the application is an .xbap...

Just like System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch is fabulously useful for a quick and dirty test that you can use to measure performance while prototyping something, so is System.Diagnostics.Process very useful when you need to make sure that your test is using...

This is probably my blog post with the most acronyms in it. In any case, on to the contents. If a user navigation to a .xaml file using Internet Explorer 7 and .NET Framework 3.0 is not installed, then it will offer the user to install it. This is...

After creating a database with a CREATE DATABASE statement without specifying any files, you may wonder where the files went. In a default installation, you will find the database files under a directory such as C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL...

I always find that looking at the Hot Off the Press page on www.microsoft.com/mspress always provides some interesting insights about what's coming. For example, you can see a couple of recently published SQL Server books: Inside Microsoft® SQL Server...

You can get to the download and a bunch of information at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/editions/compact/default.mspx . Note that the Choosing Between SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition whitepaper actually has some more...

Color-coding in SMSS just got me here... I needed to write STDEVP , but as soon as STDEV turned the right color, I went on to write the next expression, and didn't get the results I expected. Bad Marcelo. :) In any case, the rule is fairly straight...

So, here's a small gotcha I ran into while using this API not too long ago. System.IO.Directory.Delete has some interesting nuances (what happens with mounts?) - it's definitely worth reading. Something that is not currently in the documentation is...

If you are a regular reader of Michael Kaplan (I know I am), you might have run across his What's in a name? (once more) post. He comments on the use of localized account names and points to the KB 157234, How to deal with localized and renamed user and...

Just today I came across this excellent Knowledge Base article: How to transfer data to an Excel workbook by using Visual C# 2005 or Visual C# .NET It discusses a number of methods to get the task done, and seeing them all together in one page is...

Pavan has a post about a framework to implement drag & drop with attached properties in Windows Presentation Foundation - most nifty. This is just the first post of a series, so be on the lookout for future posts. He actually has a large number...

For some background on this, let me refer you to Michael Kaplan's excellent post at http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/01/11/350482.aspx . Sometimes you will be an environment in which string comparisons don't quite work like you expect them...

Although the documentation may not make it clear, GiveFeedback is an event that happens on the source side of a drag/drop operation. If you look at http://windowssdk.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.givefeedbackeventargs.effects.aspx ,...