A few days ago I was reading one of my usual news feeds The Daily WTF and saw Alex’s post (A (Long Overdue) BuildMaster Introduction) on their BuildMaster product. It looked pretty cool so I downloaded it myself and forwarded it to a colleague at another place of employment. Unfortunately for that individual their firewall policy prevents downloading .EXE files so they could not download any of the installs as they were all .EXE files. So firstly, I would recommend that anyone that wants to have their cool/nifty product downloaded by someone in a large corp should at least...

A few months ago my kids and I started up another round of playing Minecraft. The only issue was my daughter had forgotten her password and she lost the password to the email she registered it on and she couldn’t remember her questions etc to recover the password. So as I was looking for ways to recover her password I came across a way to recover it from the lastlogin file used by Minecraft if you check the ‘save password’ box, which she had done fortunately months previously when she last played. I used the Java code below and...

This is pretty much a no brainer for code. However I went and looked and everything I found was either overkill, or i wasn't certain of the internals so i had to say run it, look at the properties etc. So I wrote a simple app to do it and put it on codeplex at: http://setfiledate.codeplex.com/ This problem stemmed from the fact that I got this weird DVD player and I needed it to play some files from a USB stick in a loop. It loops fine, the problem was ordering. No clue how the ordering was. I thought it might...

apparently you can use a transaction scope for this and just wrap everything that way. but to me that seems more complicated than just enabling it with execute command.   some LINQ code like (note that ‘this’ is a data context): this.ExecuteCommand("set transaction isolation level read uncommitted"); MyTable.Take(5).Dump(); Produces this sql code: set transaction isolation level read uncommitted GO SELECT TOP 5 <fieldnames…> FROM [MyTable] AS [t0] GO   That’s what I want to see, so yay. =)     some links: http://madprops.org/blog/linq-to-sql-and-nolock-hints/ http://www.hanselman.com/blog/GettingLINQToSQLAndLINQToEntitiesToUseNOLOCK.aspx   ps. trying to use livewriter today. so far, not excited about it and still like word more =P hopefully i’ll get elightened.

So today I needed to cross reference some stuff in a text file with some stuff in a db. No big deal. Had about 200 unique values to lookup a few pieces of info out of a larger table in a db. The target table had about a half million rows in it, but was indexed on this particular column I needed to lookup on so it seemed like it should be no big deal. I have found myself using LINQPad more and more for little ad-hoc stuff like this. Anyway, I was prepared to do something similar to this:...