Today I got in to some heavy weight TSQL tuning. This time the target was a legendary sproc that was taking 3 mins and now I’m about to call it a day when this giant SP is eating only 16 sec. Not excellent but not bad at this point. Here are some notes...

Just a note… if you are getting “Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation” message when opening Test Results window in Visual Studio 2008 then it’s most likely because you have an open solution in offline mode that was bound to some TFS...

I’ve spent way too much of time today (again!) on this error so here’s blog post for future reminder to me! If you are generating or working with very large proxies then you might see following error: Exception: InvalidOperationException Message: Unable...

Some of the most disastrous code usually takes the following form try { //some code } catch { } Silencing exceptions is almost never good but sometime the problem is minor and you don’t want want to blow up and call for an exit. However wouldn...

We all know untyped data structures like DataTable and DataSet should not be passed around but sometimes - just sometimes - you got to do it because it makes sense and because it’s the most cost effective way to meet your goals. However passing things...

If you are looking to display how to display DateTime as text without causing confusion to users in different countries then good choices is either "o" or "r". The "o" format is in general more preferable as it also puts...

Many times you work on different machines, execute a command line tool but often wonder where that tool is actually installed. One way to figure this out is to look at all environment PATH variables and search them manually in same order as Windows does...

May be the silliest thing but how do you align address on the right side of a letter in Microsoft Word 2010? Select the text you need and then click on that little square in Ribbon bar: Type amount of indentation you need. It’s typically 5” for letter...

It is important to make sure your automated tests covers various real-world data combinations (for instance, some columns could be null or some rows could be duplicate). For perf testing you want to reduce effects of caching by not firing same SQL over...

When you want to store the name of a person a typical design starts out by creating two fields (in database or class): Person First Name Last Name Soon you realize lot of people have middle name, especially, when name change occurs after marriages. So...

Since about 3 years we used Groove to share calendar, notes and files within family – until I discovered a feature in OneNote called “Shared Notebooks”. The Shared Notebooks are just like any other OneNote notebooks with a difference that they get synced...

My little Twitter app was broke since past few days with error 417 - Expectation Failed. Infect most .Net apps calling Twitter APIs would be broken right now so I thought to write this up. This error is seemingly because Twitter servers have started...

They do have Space Elevator Conference , complete with a blog ! Looks like MSR is participating too (Microsoft employees gets discount - just $225 for a ride of, uhm..., armchair presentations,  for now).

There are not many web pages mentioning this so I would just post this so it comes up in search. Having personally spent 4 hours tracking this little thing down, I would want anyone else to go through same :). So... if you are using delay signing,...

Past weekend, I finally thought about giving Twitter a try and started looking for a client app that just allows me to very quickly update the status with a global keyboard shot cut. I'm not in to following anyone or replying anyone but wanted this very...

Yes, this dearly missed shell context menu item is now available again in Windows Vista, thanks to Mark Russinovich. This little new utility is a new addition to Sysinternals toolset and can be downloaded here . Just run ShellRunAs /reg to register context...

This addictive program can easily keep you busy for rest of the weekend so be careful :). Phun is a physics simulator that even kids can use and its absolutely a delight. I watched the video and had to immediately download to give it a try. At first the...

Hello, I'm Shital Shah . I currently work with NGIM team at Microsoft as SDE. I intend to use my MSDN blog for mostly technology/programming related stuff with occasional detours :). Let me put out standard big disclaimer: All views expressed in...