177 posts tagged with "technology"

I am using the latest edition of Service Factory - Modeling Edition (VS2008). I've created a number of FaultContracts in my DataContract model, and utilized them in my ServiceContract model. The generated code for the ServiceContract does not include the namespace or action for the FaultContract, e.g.

One should work hard to avoid Cursors in T-SQL — for instance, by using recursive common table expressions &ndsh; but when you need to call a separate stored procedure in a loop, you're stuck with them. I recently came across an excellent guide to the subject, Performance Tuning SQL Server Cursors, which includes the following enlightening piece of advice:

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a tool called Pex from the Microsoft Research Labs: "Pex finds interesting input-output values of your methods, which you can save as a small test suite with high code coverage." Not having much time to spend exploring it, I was fortunate to have time to attend a Twin Cities Developers Guild meeting tonight and hear a talk on on how to use the tool, which now has me jump started. First a few highlights of what I learned (without cribbing too much from Jason Bock's presentation), and then sample results from the method in my last post.

My team often starts Tuesday morning status meetings with a round of win/learn/fun - a team-building exercise where each person gets to mention an exciting "win", something they learned in the last week, or just something fun. Several weeks ago someone brought up C# Extension Methods as a learn. I could see the potential, but I didn't immediately think of any practical examples.

Problem​

SSIS 2005 (actually, Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence Studio) crashes every time you click on an OLE DB Source to edit it. (there are probably similar errors for OLE DB destinations).

Solution​

oddly enough, synchronize a few DLLs:

Version of the assemblies msmdlocal.dll and Msmgdsrv.dll must be the same of the ones installed into "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\" and the ones installed into "%ProgramFiles%\Common Files\System\Ole DB" location.

If it is not same for any or both of these DLLs, then replace the ones in PrivateAssemblies with the ones from ole db.

Hat tip: Calculation tab not working — SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services

Problem​

You have an ASP.Net web service/site that needs to access network resources, and IIS is running in a service account that you do not want to have access to those resources.

Solution​

Create a custom network account and setup a separate application pool. Microsoft article How To: Create a Service Account for an ASP.NET 2.0 Application outlines some pros/cons and gives a few alternatives, as well as giving the basic instructions. However, I found that these instructions had to be modified with inclusion of a few extra security rules. Steps:

Here's a really dumb scenario that will illustrate a point about the usefulness of the "red, green, refactor" approach to testing and coding. Here's the functionality - need to test whether or not a string has a value other than 1. Let's say I write a method before any tests:

Problem​

You have an table with encrypted columns. In the ADO.Net Entity Framework, you can't directly write an update to this table, since it does not handle the encryption commands. Furthermore, the framework will not return meaningful information, since it cannot decrypt the data. Finding the solution to this has been an adventure.

Problem​

In a T-SQL script, an exception occurs while a cursor is open, resulting in the cursor never being closed. But, the exception handling wraps the entire script, not just the cursor, so there is no guarantee that the cursor will be open if/when the CATCH statement is reached.

Solution​

query the sys.syscursors view to see if the cursor(s) in question is still open:

What's wrong with this code? There are unnecessary lines. So? Why care about unnecessary lines? Because it shows that the programmer was not really thinking about what he was doing.

MyObject obj = someList.Find(delegate(MyObject test)
{
    if (test.Id.Equals(packageId))
    {
        return true;
    }
    else
    {
        return false;
    }
});