November 27, 2003

The Enterprise Instrumentation Framework

e’ve all faced those irritable questions about our applications running in production. Typically a system administrator will spring one on you on a Friday afternoon just when you’re finishing out the week with a game of foosball. Why did this request fail? What is causing so many disk IO spikes?

Deconstructing Add-In Architecture in Visual Studio .NET

isual Studio .NET provides an incredible leap forward from its predecessor in terms of functionality, but eventually, every developer finds a sought-after feature that just seems overlooked. VS .NET provides great features and capabilities, from intelligent wizards to very useful drag-and-drop functionality such as that provided by the Server Explorer

Hearts and Minds

rom the time Visual Studio.NET was first in beta there has been a constant debate about a subject that is near and dear to all Visual Studio .NET developers. This debate centers around a single question: Which Visual Studio.NET language do I use for my development? Visual Basic .NET or

The Mind of an Angry Coder: I Take Exception to That

y favorite source code repository is SourceGear’s Vault. Besides being written in .NET, it is highly optimized for remote development scenarios. I was installing a new instance of Vault on one of my client’s servers the other day, though, and got a cryptic message about a cryptographic exception. I emailed

SQL Server 2000 Replication 101: Terminology, Types, and Configuration

eplication figures as one of the more prominent features of SQL Server 2000. Replication is a complex application that uses a combination of stored procedures and executables to distribute and copy data between SQL Server databases. If you take care not to get lost in the details and confused by

.Finalize() – Summer Travel, Blueberries, and Data Binding

nother summer, another Tech?Ed. This is, of course, the 10th anniversary of Microsoft’s annual geekfest, and I’ve had the honor of being at all of them besides one somewhere in the middle of the run. I managed to grab a speaking gig at Tech?Ed in both Dallas and Barcelona this

ADO.NET Best Practices

o get the most out of ADO.NET classes, developers must fully understand the model and study a few best practices. Based on years of real-world experience with ADO, ADO.NET provides a richer set of more powerful tools. But, ADO.NET is not designed to be an out-of-the-box tool that reduces any