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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.

SynchronizationContext the difference between Post and Send

I’ve been using SynchronizationContext for quite a while now. To me it is the best way to synchronize with the main thread. If you do a lot of winforms development like I do than you will know that you need to do this a lot. Blocking the UI is a nono. SynchronizationContext has 2 methods that are of interest to us. Send and Post. According to the MSDN documentation.

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T-SQL Tuesday #50 – Automating Your Installs

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by SQLChow (b | t) and the topic is “Automation, how much of it is the same?”. As SQLChow noted, automation was a topic a few years ago and now it is being revisited to see if and how it has changed over the years. I know for me, over the last few years, automation has taken a larger role in many of the things I do.

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T-SQL Tuesday #50: Automation, how much of it is the same?

It's the second Tuesday of the New Year, so here comes the first T-SQL Tuesday of 2014! SQLChow (blog | twitter) has the honour to host this jubilee edition of the world famous blog party. The theme of this month is the utterly DBA-related topic of Automation. However, it is pretty easy to give it a BI spin. Even we measly BI developers can automate some parts of the development. I'm talking about BIML, a metadata driven markup language (XML for the people that like acronyms) that can generate SSIS packages like you've never seen before.

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Highly Available Presentations

A little over a month ago I posted the follow quick note on Facebook The second comment I received was from Tom LaRock (b | t), who said… My initial response was essentially “Nope, on my W530” I answered quickly and probably should have elaborated, because Tom’s next comment didn’t surprise me at all. Essentially, what Tom is asking is “Is your presentation highly available?”. Tom makes a very good point and it’s one that I recommend all presenters seriously think about!

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User Group Success – Paying It Forward

In 2012, as my tenure on the PASSMN Board of Directors began, it quickly became apparent to me that “our little club” was quite fortunate. It was rare for us to have difficulty finding speakers or sponsors and when it came to SQL Saturday, the generosity of our sponsors allowed us to do great things. Tack on the fact that we would routinely pull in 40-60 attendees per meeting, and we were living the good life.

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Testing Asynchronous Javascript w/ Jasmine 2.0.0

Whether you have asynchronous methods in your client-side Javascript, are integration testing against an API, or are using an asynchronous module loader like RequireJS, asynchronous operations need testing too. Jasmine has become my framework of choice for client-side Javascript and I was happy to see the asynchronous syntax get some updates in the 2.0 release. Release Announcement: Jasmine is 5 and 2.0 Jasmine Links: http://jasmine.github.io/ (Google and Bing will both provide the address to the 1.

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Happy 2014

I am a bit late with the almost obligatory "How was my past year and how do I think next year is going to rock" blog post – we're already a good week into the new year – but without further ado I present you: How was my past year and how do I think next year is going to rock! 2013 was not a bad year professional wise. I had set some goals and I managed to reach most of them (which is quite a miracle, because I excel at abandoning New Year's resolutions at the very first chance possible).

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2013 – Review of Writing

In 2013 I took on a slightly different approach to writing by putting more into each article with content, length and defining either what the topic was on or how the troubleshooting methods are taken. This, of course, meant my average blog count per month was way down in 2013 from 2012. In all, only 3.5 blogs per month. In 2012, I was averaging over 7. Value in the content does take more effort though.

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Who would benefit from Product Information Management

A lot of PIM projects start together with an e-commerce project. The e-commerce project will make products available online and to maintain the product information a PIM project is started preceding the e-commerce project. In my previous post “What is Product Information Management?” I explained what Product Information Management is. But who would benefit from such a PIM project? The e-commerce team Since they are in most cases the first requesters for a PIM system, it’s obvious they will benefit from this.

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A New Solution for Monitoring SQL Server

Monitoring a SQL Server environment is one of the many tasks a DBA should be performing on a regular basis. However, you need to know more than “Is my SQL Server still running? Did my backups complete?” You should know what your average performance is over time – baselines. You should be able to get notifications if there is a long-running query, or if a disk is running low on space, or if there is blocking.

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