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LessThanDot

A decade of helpful technical content

This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.

Speaking of resolutions...

It’s New Year’s Day and I am finishing the last of my traditional holiday vacation. Tomorrow, I will return to my office after a hiatus of almost two weeks and am sure I will spend most of the day inundated by emails and following up on the projects that were in process when I left. But today, I was reading through recent blog posts by two of our more prolific writers here on LessThanDot, Onpnt (Ted Krueger) with Blogging isn’t easy unless you have support and SQLDenis (Denis Gobo) with Ah yes, those pesky resolutions.

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Ah yes, those pesky resolutions

It is 6:22 AM and I am the only person awake in our house. I didn’t really wanted to write a post like this but since everyone else is sleeping and I don’t want to wake them by doing other stuff, here it goes. There are a couple of things I want to accomplish this year, here is what those things are. Read more technical books I read a decent amount of books every year, in 2012 I managed to read 51 books, you can see all of them here http://pinterest.

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Blogging isn't easy unless you have support

Over the past year, and previous years, writing blogs, articles for various publications and even books, has been one of the most enjoyable aspects to my work in the data and professional development world. Given today is the last day of 2012, this year I think was great for writing and one that I have improved upon my skills, development and writing. Something I’d like to go into the New Year with is a special thanks for a few people that have made my ability and ambition for writing possible.

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SHOW_STATISTICS Density showing key column – Why?

I received an email the other day asking why, when running SHOW_STATISTICS, a person was always seeing the primary key in the statistics column density and other output, when the primary key was not part of the index the statistics were created from. This is a great question and relates to an article I’m writing on selectivity and ordering in the creation of an index while writing queries. I thought a quick post would be great on it, since the answer isn’t truly standing out when you search for the reason statistics on nonclustered indexes will always contain the primary key or unique constraint column (on a table that is clustered).

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ServiceStack.Text has a nice extension method called Dump and it has a few friends

Introduction Yesterday I was adding a pdf feature to my Nancy service. And I was outputting my objects to the pdf like this. foreach (var prop in model.GetType().GetProperties()) { oDoc.Add(new Paragraph(prop.Name + ":" + prop.GetValue(model).ToString())); }``` But we all know this is far from finished and will only work in the most simple of cases, once you add complex types to your type the results will be less than optimal.

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Nancy and returning a pdf

Introduction So I have been doing this Nancy series for a while now and the demoproject is still up at Github. Today I’m going to try and return a pdf from a request. The Response. So instead of returning json or html or some such I want to return a pdf page. I guess I could write a complete viewengine if needed but I don’t need that I just want my trees module to return a pdf in a certain format when requested.

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2012 Analytics about Devices, Operating Systems and Browsers

In yesterday’s post we looked at Searches, Countries and Content. Today we are looking at Devices, Operating Systems and Browsers. Microsoft came out with a new operating system at the end of October. during the month of December, Windows 8 accounted for 7.88% of all Windows visitors. We’ll have to see how long it will take before Windows 8 passes Windows XP. Mobile Devices This table list all the mobile devices that accessed this site aggregated over the whole year.

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Nancy and C# uploading and showing an image

Introduction I have been using Nancy for a few weeks now and made a demo application that you can find on Github. Today I will add the ability for you to add a picture to a user. The upload For this we need to change our UsersModule and add a few methods. First we add a get so that we can show a page with the userdata and an upload form.

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Batch renaming files with powershell

I like powershell and from time to time I even use it. This time I needed to rename a lot of files in some directory I had. First thing to note is that these files are on a NAS. No problem just do cd \192.168.1.152series``` and you&#8217;re on that drive. <div class="image_block"> <a href="/wp-content/uploads/users/chrissie1/powershell/powershellbatchrename2.png?mtime=1356627627"><img alt="" src="/wp-content/uploads/users/chrissie1/powershell/powershellbatchrename2.png?mtime=1356627627" width="813" height="252" /></a> </div> That doesn&#8217;t work with the normal commandline BTW. <div class="image_block"> <a href="/wp-content/uploads/users/chrissie1/powershell/powershellbatchrename1.

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2012 Analytics about Searches, Countries and Content.......

Every year I like to do a couple of posts showing some analytics about the visitors to this site In this post we will be looking at the searches, the content and the countries that visitors came from Content Here are the top 25 most visited pages on this site during the year 2012. Page Title Percentage All Blogs 15.

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