When writing queries that group and aggregate, it is not uncommon for there to be many columns in the SELECT clause that are neither in the GROUP BY clause nor being aggregated. Learn two different ways to write such queries without compromising performance.

I was working on some code today, that was trying to find a string in a list of strings. I came up with a neat way to express it using a lambda expression.

The first time I tried to add an intro and an exit slide to a Camtasia video, I had some problems with the audio becoming un-synced. Here is how to add the sound and image slides to the video without problems.

This article presents some interesting ideas on when and when not to use AJAX.

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/stop-using-ajax/

This week I needed a particular VisualStudio 2005 project template called "ASP.NET AJAX-enabled Web site" and I could not for the life of me get it to show up. Here are the steps I used to fix it.

SQL Server provides three different ways to retrieve identity values generated by the database. Here is a detailed description of how they differ.

You can't run MSI or CAB files "As Administrator" directly from the explorer in Vista, but there's a workaround.

I am attending the ALT.NET open spaces conferences this weekend. The opening was last night and was my introduction to the whole open spaces concept (see the video of the opening at Jeffery Palermo's web site). So many of the bloggers that I follow are attending. It was great to meet them.

If you want to set the same value on a whole set of rows, you can use ActiveFocus powerful multi edit feature to save time.

After a Vista upgrade none of my .NET 3.5 web applications would run! Visual Studio gives a "Child nodes not allowed" error for the web.config file, but there is a simple solution - once you find it.

Today I refactored some code that has been bugging me for a while, and wanted to share the results. The change resulted in a substantial code reduction and what I felt was a more elegant solution.

Passing Microsoft Exam 70-315 Web Applications with Visual C# and Visual Studio.NET - A recent exam-taker's experience and tips for success.

How do you build a VisualStudio solution file without VisualStudio installed? Answer: MSBuild, but there is a gotchya.

Learn how and why to convert a scalar user-defined function to a table-valued one

My name is Angelo Martinez and I am new here at Falafel Software. I have known Lino Tadros for a long time and I can assure you that this is a great place to be! My hope is to start blogging on new ideas/tools/technologies that I discover along the way. With that in mind... I had a requirement to build a generic MRU (Most Recently Used) class based on a Key/Value pair. Among other things, the class contains methods such as Add(), Find() and a Count property that reports the number of items currently in the list. It would be nice to be able to build a set of unit tests to verify the functionality of the new class. For this, Visual Studio 2008 comes to the rescue!

Prior to 2005, if you needed to access the value of a newly inserted IDENTITY column, you were bound to row-based operations so you could access each value using the SCOPE_IDENTITY() function. But now, there is another way...