Automating Windows Defender Updates
If you have automatic Windows Updates turned off, you may have noticed that you also don’t get Windows Defender updates automatically. There are a lot of reasons why you may want to disable automatic...
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Code Contracts Part 1 – Introduction
Series Redux I discovered Microsoft Code Contracts several years ago and fell in love with the idea. Code Contracts have helped me to write better software since 2008 so I’d like to share them with...
View ArticleEarth Surface Distance in T-SQL
A few years ago, I was working on a project where I needed to calculate the distance between pairs of points on the Earth’s surface. With a bit of research, I found an implementation of the haversine...
View ArticleChange Data Capture and Change Tracking Deep Dive
Here are the slides and scripts from my Change Data Capture and Change Tracking Deep Dive talk that I’ve been delivering at various conferences and user groups recently. PowerPoint Presentation SQL...
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Invoking Stored Procedures from Azure Mobile Services
One of the questions I’m often asked is whether it’s possible to call SQL stored procedures from Azure Mobile Services. The answer is yes and it’s probably easier than you think. In case you don’t...
View ArticleOn Primary Key Names
If you use frameworks like Microsoft Azure Mobile Services or Ruby on Rails, then you’re accustomed to complying with a host of development conventions. Frameworks are often said to be opinionated,...
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Generating Filenames Dynamically in SSIS
A file’s name and location are often used to express what’s inside it. Filenames are not required to be meaningful to human beings but they often follow some sort of pattern for categorizing and...
View ArticleSchema Refactoring with Views
Database triggers are generally pretty awful. Anyone who has had to deal with a database heavily laden with DML triggers knows this and avoids using them. If anyone tells me that they must use a...
View ArticleTechnically-Oriented People
A friend recently asked me to describe the differences between the various species of technically-oriented people. I wrote this in an email in about five minutes so I’m sure I left out some key...
View ArticleKevin’s Career Upgrade v6.0 – Amazon AWS
I started my career in software development 34 years ago. I was 16 years old and a relative needed a program that helped her with a file classification project at a local hospital. I wrote a really bad...
View Article.NET Back to Basics – Delegates to Expression Trees
I led a talk at the Richmond, Virginia .NET User Group on 2016/2/4 about how delegates have evolved in .NET since 2002. We had about 40 in attendance from my rough count and the discussion was...
View ArticleThe Simplest Possible Thing Principle
I mentor lots of young developers. It became a passion for me in the 1990s when I started teaching computer programming at a local college. I was not a good teacher for the first couple of years,...
View ArticleExtract JWT Claims in Azure API Management Policy
JSON Web Tokens (JWT) are easy to validate in Azure API Management (APIM) using policy statements. This makes integration with Azure Active Directory and other OpenID providers nearly foolproof. For...
View ArticleCreate SAS Tokens for Azure API Management with an Azure Function
Shared Access Signature (SAS) tokens are required to call Azure API Management’s original REST API. We can generate these manually on the Azure portal for testing. However, in production, if you want...
View ArticleHTTP 404 for Missing API Resources
Should an API return HTTP 404 status when the specified resource cannot be found? Of course, that’s exactly what (Not Found) means. As RFC2616 states pretty clearly, 404 Not Found means: The server has...
View ArticleGenerating Cosmos DB Auth Tokens in Postman
If you read the official article that describes how access control works in Cosmos DB, you’ll see this handy Node.js function for generating authentication tokens using a master key:var crypto =...
View ArticleShape CosmosDB Output with JMESPath
According to James Saryerwinie, his truly awesome query language for JSON is pronounced James Path. I trust him on the pronunciation of JMESPath. Besides, when I used to say “Jay-mezz Path,” it just...
View ArticleCosmos DB Server-Side Primer – Episode 1
Stored procedures in Cosmos DB are JavaScript functions that run close to the data to ensure high performance. In addition to great performance, stored procedures provide multi-operation transaction...
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