I have been recently working quite a lot in Visual Studio Code (VSC), writing some Go code. With the Go for Visual Studio Code extension – writing code is easy and simple experience. For .Net however, I was using full version of Visual Studio. There were several reasons for that. Initially, VSC was designed to build ASP.Net code and I rarely do web applications only. Technically speaking, one could have used command line tools like msbuild or csc for building other types of .

My 10 year old daughter made some muffins completely on her own. Not a big deal for a grown up, but an achievement for a child. The kind of achievement little ones can be proud of. Somehow, before eating them, she decided that she wants them to be photographed. And started acting like a designer and art director. The one thing I could do at that point is to perform. Take the camera to the kitchen and make it happen.

Recently I gave a presentation on SQL Server transaction performance diagnostics and improvement on Microsoft organized TechDay events in Lithuania and Latvia. The time for the talk was very limited and topic – really big and complex. So I have decided to briefly cover some aspects like blocking & deadlocks, query plans and finally some tools for diagnostics, including my new favorite - extended events (xEvents). For those who want to know more about the topics I’ve talked, you will have to dig deeper on your own, but hopefully you have some idea.

I was excited, when I saw the Windows Azure Mobile Services announcement. The idea itself is great – all those different services joined into a single, simple cohesive API. While SDK for other platforms (even Windows Phone) is currently not available, but that is not a big problem, because underneath it uses the same HTTP. Mobile services provide several important features: data storage, authentication, authorization and push notifications. In fact, if you think about developing apps for the user that have to share the state (e.

It happens that I have attended Agile Tour Vilnius 2011 conference. A lot of great speakers delivered interesting presentations on various Agile aspects from technical to management, for beginners and for those with some experience. Keynotes were presented by J.B. Rainsberger, Mary Poppendieck and Jurgen Appelo. Ok, here are few things that I’ve noted during the conference (typically, I try to take top 3 things for myself) so, here it comes:

Sometimes I like to cite “Remember remember the fifth of November” in case, when I trip the mine that I teach others to avoid. This time it happened, when reviewing some database structure and related code. So, here it goes. The database had a table, which can be scripted as shown below. As you can probably note, we are talking about a table that holds queue of jobs that have to be performed.

I bought recently 3TB WD drive. You may know that drives over 2.19TB are not supported in Windows XP/2003 systems due to the lack of GPT support. Windows Home Server of course doesn’t work with drives more than 2TB size, but there are some workarounds. First, you will need a driver for HBA that comes with WD drive. I found that it is HighPoint Rocket 620 and you can find Windows XP/2003 drivers here.

One month ago I was thinking which type of phone I’d like to have. I was choosing between Android and Windows based phones. After some review reading, talking to people and hands-on experience I’ve selected Windows 7 phone: HTC Trophy. There were couple of reasons for this: Didn’t wanted to have a toy to play “hacking” games Spending time figuring out OS version upgradeability not for me Wanted to know what works and what doesn’t early Form factor In other words, I wanted more “user oriented” phone than a smart device.

Today I was giving presentation at “Powered by MVP” event in Lithuania. The topic: what to do, when programs leak, crash and misbehave in many other ways. The summary: there are tools that can help you finding the cause problem and solving them. They only require some time to learn and some more time to master, but otherwise – it is much better than automatic IIS pool recycling because of a faulty app.

I saw the this post (via @seandaniel) called “Why I plan on using the new Windows Home Server 2011” (a.k.a. “Vail”). I have quickly ran my eyes over the blog post and well – I do NOT agree and I cannot accept the decision given the little I know. Surely, I’m slightly different kind of persona and I am using WHS slightly differently and my priorities are different. For me it is a backup and storage machine that is used at home mostly.