...and master of none

Here's a quickie. If you need to have a new random number on a column, this works really well. rand(cast(cast(NEWID() as varbinary) as int)) number Of course NEWID generates a random guid. Casting it as a varbinary first, then as an int gives you a random number which can then be used as a seed for the random number generator.

Here is a nice use for Common Table Expressions (CTEs) to generate a dates table or other list of stuff. I won't take credit for this technique since I saw it someplace else (but can't remember where). Of course my blog is for stuff I want to remember, so thanks to whoever you are... declare @loops int = 1000 declare @StartDate date = '1/1/2000'; WITH CountTable( RowNumber, [Month], [Year], FirstDay ) AS ( SELECT 1 RowNumber, MONTH(@StartDate) [Month], YEAR(@StartDate) [Year], -- compute the first day of the month from whatever day was provided DATEADD(dd,-(DAY(@StartDate)-1),@StartDate) FirstDay UNION ALL SELECT RowNumber + 1 RowNumber, MONTH(DATEADD(MONTH, 1, FirstDay)), YEAR(DATEADD(MONTH, 1, FirstDay)), DATEADD(MONTH, 1, FirstDay) FirstDay FROM CountTable t WHERE RowNumber The results look like this:  1 1 2000 2000-01-01 2 2 2000 2000-02-01 3 3 2000 2000-03-01 4 4 2000 2000-04-01 5 5 2000 2000-05-01 6 6 2000 2000-06-01 7 ...

On my freenas server I sometimes need to change the permissions of files that were uploaded via FTP. Here is the command that can be issued to make those changes: chmod -R 0777 "/mnt/Seagate650/FTP Root" The quotes are important because my ftp root directory contains a space.

.Net will allow you to easily load any dll you want to into the current AppDomain by simply calling Assembly.LoadFrom() with the path of the dll in question. However, this is only available for the current AppDomain, and as a result, the dll remains loaded for the duration of the AppDomain's lifetime. This may be ok, but if you want to simply load a dll, inspect it, and run some one-time operations on it, that seems a bit wasteful. In web development, it means you must shut down your web server to recompile the dll you're loading. So, the solution would seem to be to start up a new appDomain, load the dll in question, do your work, and then unload the appDomain. Gentlemen, start your compilers... namespace Utilities { public class SomeClass{ public static void RegisterApplication( string appPath) { if (File.Exists(appPath)) { var domainSetup = new AppDomainSetup() { ApplicationBase = AppDomain.CurrentDomain .BaseDirectory, Pr...

Phil Haack's talk on asp.net reminded me of the importance of handling CSRF attacks. In MVC, this is simply handled with a one-two punch. In your posting form, you need to include the Html.AntiForgeryToken() in the form as follows: The other thing is to add an [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] attribute to the targeted posting action in your controller as follows: [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] [HttpPost] // or MVC 1.0 style [AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)] public virtual ActionResult Delete(FormCollection form, int id) { // code here to delete stuff return View(); } Also don't forget that we want to make sure that any state-changing operations are always posts! My new syntax highlighting is accomplished via a method outlined on Carter Cole's most excellent blog.

I've been using Linq to SQL since it came out. Linq to Entities didn't have any compelling functionality, and it was far less supported in the development community. Nobody seemed to be using it. For whatever reason, when the language group at Microsoft came out with Linq, the data group was slow on the uptake and that left the language group with the need for an actual database query layer, so Linq to SQL was born. There were rumors that Linq to SQL would not continue to evolve, but it certainly worked fine for what I needed. The 2009 Microsoft PDC had all kinds of interesting things, but absolutely nothing regarding Linq to SQL. The language group became enammored with .NET 4 and the dynamic language features and have apparently orphaned Linq to SQL. Not so the data group. The improvements to Linq to Entities seem to breathe new life into what had previously been a "me too" implementation of Linq. Certainly the biggest news about Linq to Entities relates to the new ...

Yea, I know, boring title. But I really want to make sure I can find the code for how to do this one. jQuery is very cool. All the eye candy is nice, the syntax is excellent, but the real benefit is AJAX... The autocomplete jQuery library is extremely nice. It allows you to take a Json result from some url and suggest results to a text box. What I want is for the selected value to populate another input field (hidden) so that I have a real foreign key relationship to the item they selected. here's the html: <input class="location" id="LocationName"> <input id="LocationId" type="hidden" keyFor="LocationName"/> Or alternately you can use Html Helpers <%= Html.TextBox("LocationName", null, new {class = "location"}) %> <%= Html.Hidden("LocationId", null, new {keyFor = "LocationName"})%> and here is the supporting javascript: $(document).ready(function() { $('.loc...