Debugging IIS w3wp.exe process

When debugging  IIS and taking a while to look at your code, you may sometimes get this message

To fix this simply switch off the ping enabled setting in your IIS, application pool, advanced settings

Microsoft AVI code (.NET App Performance monitoring)

Perhaps the most wrongly named application I've had to remember the name of recently, used for monitoring .NET application performance...

http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/avicode.aspx

Microsoft PDC Archive

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC

Binding to a constant in XAML WPF

Example...

Add this to your controls namespace declarations

xmlns:MyNameSpace="clr-namespace:MyNameSpace;assembly=MyAssembly"

then use it as follows in your markup

ToolTipService.ShowDuration="{x:Static MyNameSpace:MyClass.MY_CONSTANT}"

Multithreaded testing with MSTest.exe in Visual Studio

To set the unit tests to run in MTA mode, add the MTA mode attribute to the Execution element as shown in the following example:


<Execution>
     <ExecutionThread apartmentState="MTA" />
</Execution>

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/irenak/archive/2008/02/22/sysk-365-how-to-get-your-unit-tests-test-project-in-visual-studio-2008-a-k-a-mstest-run-multithreaded.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms404663.aspx

Enabling all disabled triggers in SQL Server

select 'ALTER TABLE ' + o.name + ' ENABLE TRIGGER ' + s.name
from sys.objects o
inner join sys.triggers s on s.parent_id = o.object_id
and s.is_disabled = 1

Rebuilding indexes in SQL Server

DBCC SHOWCONTIG ("dbo.TableName") - Check your Scan Density...

DBCC SHOWCONTIG scanning TableName table...
Table: TableName (2099048); index ID: 1, database ID: 5
TABLE level scan performed.
- Pages Scanned................................: 74056
- Extents Scanned..............................: 9259
- Extent Switches..............................: 9258
- Avg. Pages per Extent........................: 8.0
- Scan Density [Best Count:Actual Count].......: 99.98% [9257:9259]
- Logical Scan Fragmentation ..................: 0.01%
- Extent Scan Fragmentation ...................: 1.57%
- Avg. Bytes Free per Page.....................: 45.7
- Avg. Page Density (full).....................: 99.44%
DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact your system administrator.

Then rebuld if you need

DBCC DBREINDEX ("dbo.TableName")

Tracing deadlocks in SQL Server

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Performance+Tuning/tracingdeadlocks/1324/
Found that these three dbcc traceon calls worked for us in SQL 2008
DBCC TRACEON (1222, -1)
DBCC TRACEON (3604)
DBCC TRACEON (1204)

Then check the SQL logs to see exactly what is causing the dead lock to occur

Yey - I'm now officially contracting

From 4th April I'll be stepping into the world of the contractor for the first time. How exciting is that!

HTML5 video player tutorial

Bypassing Word document password setting

If you ever have a Microsoft Word document that you want the merged version of, but are unable to do this as there is a password set on the document preventing you from accepting all changes, then simply email the document as an attachment to your Google mail (Gmail) account, and view it online. From there you will see Google does the merging for you and you are then able to export off a new version in word document format, with all the changes accepted.