Recently, I’ve been involved in a very interesting project in which we need to perform operations on a table containing 3,000,000,000+ rows. For some tooling, I needed a quick and reliable way to count the number of rows contained within this table...

Learned something new today. Maybe it’s well-known, but new to me, you can just run “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Publishing\1.4\SqlPubWiz.exe”. This nifty little tool can generate INSERT script very easily. Pictures tell the story...

Recently, I had to implement an SSIS package which imports some data into SQL Server from MSMQ. It turns out reading MSMQ from within an SSIS package is more difficult than it seems at first. I’ve documented how to get things working because I could find...

Connecting to Team Foundation Server 2010 beta 2 from Visual Studio 2008 is easy: from Team Explorer, type the full URL in the "add server" dialog, e.g.: http://mytfsserver:8080/tfs/defaultcollection Please ensure you've (re-)installed Visual Studio 2008...

When using the new System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement namespace, one might be inclined (as was I) to use the following code to add a user to a group (exception and comments handling removed): using ( GroupPrincipal groupPrincipal = GroupPrincipal...

Recently, I used Unity v1.2, which in my opinion is a great product. I had difficulty, however, with the configuration for a scenario I encountered. I needed an enum value to be passed to a constructor. Trying as I might, there was no way Unity was accepting...

Quick note: if you configure a custom extension in WCF, don't forget to add it as a reference to your project. If you don't configuration will run just fine, but at runtime, the following exception occurs: System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException...

Let's say you're writing unit tests for code which uses COM objects. You want some initialization and some cleanup to be done. So you set up your test: private static MyStore store; [ ClassInitialize ()] public static void MyClassInitialize( TestContext...

I’m currently writing an Outlook add-in and I’m looking into getting this compatible with both Office 2007 and Office 2010. One of the new features in Outlook 2010 is the main window Ribbon. Using VSTO, you can create your own Ribbon, which can be...

Recently, a colleague of mine had a requirement of getting information on the number of pages being printed by users. Monitoring a printer is done by calling FindFirstPrinterChangeNotification, waiting for the returned WaitHandle to be signaled and then...

Recently, I asked my colleagues if they were interested in beta testing some software I’m building for internal use. I used voting buttons to enable easy tracking of replies. When I wanted to reply to all people who voted “Yes” on my request, I discovered...

Planning on Enterprise Library 5 has started! See Gregori's blog for more information if you want your EntLib needs to be in the next release: http://blogs.msdn.com/agile/archive/2009/01/26/enterprise-library-5-what-s-on-your-wish-list.aspx !

Every developer knows about and uses Reflector ;-) I use it a lot to learn about the inner workings of products. When analyzing what goes where and why, it's easy to lose track (jumping from method to method to base class, etc.). Bookmarks are quick and...

Given the vast amount of information transported between systems in today's enterprise environments, a lot of which is considered either private (addresses, social security numbers, credit card information, mortgage and pension plans, etc) or of high...

Recently, we tried creating a secondary Isolated Host to separate receive and send processing for WCF. After reconfiguring the servers, we were faced with the "Receive location for address ' ' not found. (The BizTalk receive location may be disabled)...

Introduction Recently, I was experimenting with Team Foundation Server 2008, setting it up with SSL and running it within a test domain. For the Team Foundation Server, I couldn't use the host installation as it runs Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 edition...

FWIW: I recently ran into trouble while developing for the .NET Compact Framework, v3.5. Upon all exceptions, the framework would tell me: " An error message is available for this exception but cannot be displayed because these messages are optional...

When writing WCF implementations, or any code for that matter, testing is an important part of the process. This week, I was building tests for implemented WCF services and had difficulty aligning all the external dependencies of the tests (running hosts...

Recently, I needed to validatie messages going into a WCF service. It turned out the WCF samples are a rich source of knowledge and I found a sample which performs XMLSchema-based validation in \TechnologySamples\Extensibility\MessageInspectors. ...

Based on the excellent article from Stephen Toub , I was inspired to write a Shockwave Flash preview handler. Basically, it's just a plain UserControl which hosts the ActiveX wrapper for the player. It works from both Outlook 2007 and Windows Vista. The...

A previous post of mine had some sample code on creating BizTalk Server Orchestrations programmatically, opening up template based guidance packages. The sourcecode for the sample can now be found here .

As we are phasing out GotDotNet, projects need a new location to be hosted. I've moved the BizTalk Server Pipeline Component Wizard to it's new location. Please find it here .

In the time to come, I'll be uploading packages available from my previous blog in the past because they got lost during my ISP transfer. First off, here 's the CompositeUI Application Block XBAP WPF implementation, as I blogged about here . Please...

Microsoft Consulting Services in The Netherlands has developed a great integration masterclass, in which integration specialists compare Microsoft integration technologies and deliver real-world field experience in BizTalk Server implementations including...

Welcome to my blog. My name is Martijn Hoogendoorn, I work for the Dutch Services dvision of Microsoft and will be posting my technical adventures on here. I've been blogging for some time now; previous posts can be found here (archive only).