Sean Ferguson

I recently wrote a simple program for displaying SQL query results in a DataGridView, but noticed it was crashing on varbinary columns. After much searching on the internet, I found out that the default format for a varbinary column is to display it as...

I learned something interesting about SQL parameters today. In my C# code I was passing a comma separated string as a parameter to a stored procedure using SqlParameter, but it was allowing ' through unchecked causing havoc in the stored procedure. It...

I have a stored procedure that expects an array of binary values. I'm currently passing it as a comma separate string but I think that is a horrible hack. I tried using XML, but that didn't seem to work, but it's very possible I could have been doing...

See anything wrong with the code below? I didn't until Visual Studio gave me a nice squiggly red line indicating something was wrong. IList aList = new List (); foreach (A a in aList) { // Do something } A a = new A(); This is the error:...

I was recently adding some tables to a database, and was presented with the silly problem of naming a table "User" or "Users." To me the table name should represent the entity, but on the flip side the table is holding a collection of those entities....

The database we are coding for isn't well suited for making quick changes while doing index or query optimization, so I trying to find a good way to swap out the data abstraction layer cleanly to use a different database backend. Does anyone have any...

The other day was a SQL learning adventure. A team member was trying to find the phrase "Q&A" using the search functionality of our product, but found no results. They were surprised at this considering they had proof the phrase should have been returned...

I recently had an interesting experience with the varbinary column in SQL Server. Here was my problem: I was inserting 0x012 into a varbinary column with the expectation that is what would be stored. Perhaps taking into consideration byte alignment...

Today I was trying to calculate the size of a specific index in SQL Server and realized it's not obvious to calculate. I poked around Management Studio and was able to get the size of all indexes for a table, but not for a single index. Thinking I must...

I was encouraged by my manager to start blogging, so here I am. I hope to keep this up to date with tidbits of information I learn throughout my adventures here at Microsoft.