MCS UK Solution Development Team

Transact-SQL includes a number of date and time functions that have values are derived from the operating system of the computer on which the instance of SQL Server is running. With SQL Azure these functions are all standardised on UTC (as you would expect...

Warning: WiX 3.5 is still under development, so you may encounter things that do not work with your specific build of WiX, this article is based on build 1602. When you are in a tightly controlled corporate environment it is not always possible to deploy...

Earlier this week we spotted we had a problem with a Silverlight application that has been live for a while.  We were only able to reproduce it with the Silverlight 4 runtime installed and not the Silverlight 3 runtime.  The reason is actually...

The Azure platform in the form of the Fabric Controller (FC) provides monitoring for a health of a role instance. The table below summarises common problems, their detection mechanism and the action taken by the fabric controller: Problem How Detected...

Whilst working on a proof of concept, we came up with an idea for an interesting menu that would form an arc around a company logo at the top-left corner of the UI: When a user moves the mouse over one of the icons it would be magnified, much like a fish...

If you are somehow involved with TFS and ALM, I bet you have heard about TFS Integration Platform ( http://tfsintegration.codeplex.com/ ). This is one great project allowing you to integrate TFS with other systems – including older versions of TFS. It...

In most projects there is always a requirement for tracing and/or writing debugging information along with writing out log information. When dealing with objects it is usually up to the developer to override the ToString() method to ensure meaningful...