Here is the scenario:  You get a .NET DLL from somewhere that provides some really cool functionality that you need for your BizTalk/SharePoint/etc application.  So you go to install the utility into the GAC, and then you realize that the DLL...

I started using Windows Live Writer to write posts for my blog recently and I have to say that I really like it. It can interface with Spaces and many common blog servers including "Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress (and many others)." Plus it...

Some of my recent posts have mentioned the Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework CTP that was released in December by the Parallel Computing Team at Microsoft. This post is meant to give an introduction to the Parallel Extensions, as well as some...

The SQL Server 2008 Feb CTP has been released and can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/2008/prodinfo/download.mspx I can't wait to test some of the new spatial features, compression, and the long awaited MERGE statement.

Joe Duffy and other members of the Parallel Extensions team at Microsoft Research talk about the Task Parallel Library. This is a great presentation and they go into quite a bit of depth about the internals of the TPL. I am very interested in the TPL...

I can't remember where I picked this tip up from, but I have found it useful on many occasions so I thought that I would share it. Sometimes I need to reference the strong named assembly that I am writing in a config file or some other location, and...

This is a pretty common situation that comes up when performing database operations. A stored procedure is called and the data needs to be updated if it already exists and inserted if it does not. If we refer to the Books Online documentation, it gives...