What I actually do at Microsoft
I started working at Microsoft in January 2022. I enjoy it. I even wrote a stream-of-consciousness post about it last year. A significant part of our job in the Database Docs team, is to resolve…
Choco upgrade, y’all
Chocolatey is a package manager for Windows, like the built-in package managers on Linux, and third-party ones on macOS like Homebrew and MacPorts. The idea is this: when you’re setting up a machine, you don’t…
The denial-of-service attack is coming from inside the house
A short post this week. While I was helping some friends recently, we experienced a curious thing where as soon as an application was started up, it was immediately followed by a denial-of-service attack that…
Read the error message
This post is brought to you — indirectly — from a boss I loved working for, on a project which almost killed me, at a company which I had to walk away from to restore…
Convert legacy password storage without aggravating your users
In a previous post I wrote about storing password hashes in a database, which raises the question of how to convert an existing legacy password storage system to use hashes (or even no passwords!) without annoying the…
The easy way to handle UTF-8 in a .NET application when dealing with SQL Server 2019
A short post this week. On a mailing list recently, someone noticed that a .NET application writing to SQL Server did not have the expected behaviour with UTF-8 collation and data types. To refresh our…
Performance as a feature, software developer edition
Relational database management systems (RDBMS) like SQL Server and Azure SQL Database are very good at managing normalized data. Efficient storage and retrieval of data is the name of the game, so performance is a…
The cloud is not just someone else’s computer
A year ago, I wrote in a post that cloud computing is just someone else’s data center. I was wrong. Whether we like it or not, the cloud is more than just a bunch of 1s…
Why You Need A Test Environment
In 2017, there’s no excuse not to have at least a testing environment, and preferably a development environment as well, in order to create and deploy code changes (software, database, you name it) outside of…