Another IT blog

Cleanup TFS Workspaces

David — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 15:50:09 +0000

If you did several chekouts from TFS on your local machine using 2 different users, there’s a mess up of workspaces on your local computer and you may have issues doing other checkouts.

To clean up the workspaces, use the following commands in the Visual Studio command line tool:

tf workspaces to list the checkouts done on the machine

tf workspaces /remove:* or tf workspace /delete ;

and here you are, your development computer is now ready for another clean checkout

How to drop all connections of a database?

David — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 22:42:56 +0000

In my current project, we need quite often to do a restore of the SQL Server database of the testing environment. It can be a nightmare to have to restore a database while dozens of persons are using it.

A simple solution to do it exists:

First, detach the database:
- From the MS SQL Server Management Studio, right-click on the database and choose “Detach”
- Tick the “Drop Connections” box
- Detach the database
All the connections are dropped and you can perform your restore of the database
Here you are, users can continue to use the database until your next restore.

Add local users in TFS 2010

David — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 14:52:02 +0000

To give acess to local users in your projects in Team Foundation Server 2010, you need to:

use the team foundation server administration console from the server itself
Select the Project Collection you want to administrate
Select the option administrate security
Select the [Collection]/Valid users group and click on properties
You should find the contributors group of your project there, select the group and click properties
From there you can add local users.

Slow debugging on Visual Studio

David — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:27:39 +0000

Recently, I was experiencing a very slow debugging with Visual Studio for an ASP.NET project.

There are few solutions for that on Internet:

Review the locations from where the computer is loading symbols
Review the debugging parameters
Stop the add-ons
…

It didn’t help me at all… Looking for a solution, finding one, implementing it and start this cycle over because no solutions would work.

The workaround I found was to start the project in debug and then “stop” the debug mode in visual studio and browse the ASP.NET site from the local server. But it’s not really helpful when you want to use breakpoints, watches and all the rest of the good debugger tools.

The solution I found is reinstalling Visual Studio. It worked like magic… I think I installed some tools (like SQL Server) that messed up with Visual Studio and reinstalling it was the solution.

If you have such a slowness problem…I wish you good luck and please, try to not become insane… it almost happened to me

Truncated SQL statement with Nant

David — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:18:35 +0000

Lately, I had an issue with a SQL script that couldn’t pass via the Nant task.

In fact, this script was quite big and got truncated during its execution. I managed to solve this putting the “delimstyle” parameter to “Line“. The only drawback of this is that all “GO” statements should be on a separate line. But it’s generally the case.

Some interesting SQL Server queries

David — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 16:54:25 +0000

Lately, I needed to develop a utility checking the structure of a SQL Serve 2005 database and saving structure and data in XML files. The objective was to easily obtain XML files to initialize the state of our database for Integration Testing.

Anyway, I needed to google a lot to find the SQL queries I needed to get all the details about the tables and structure of my database. Below, you’ll find the queries I used. I think it’s useful to store them in a single location.

To list all the tables (out of system tables) of your database: exec sp_tables @table_type=’TABLE’

To get all the details of a table (in several result sets): sp_help table_name

To list all columns from a table: select name from syscolumns where id=object_id(‘tablename’)”

To list the columns part of primary key:
SELECT cu.COLUMN_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.KEY_COLUMN_USAGE cu WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT tc.* FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS tc WHERE tc.CONSTRAINT_CATALOG = ‘databasename’ AND tc.TABLE_NAME = ‘tablename” AND tc.CONSTRAINT_TYPE = ‘PRIMARY KEY’ AND tc.CONSTRAINT_NAME = cu.CONSTRAINT_NAME )

check if a column is identity:SELECT COLUMNPROPERTY( OBJECT_ID(‘tablename’),’columnname’,'IsIdentity’)

I’m pretty sure there are tons of other useful commands that I still need to learn. But at least this was what I needed.

Hello World !

David — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 02:44:14 +0000

There is no need for another IT blog, there are hundreds of thousands from the best experts all over the world.

Anyway, as I’m starting again to have a technical role in a project team… I’ll try to add my word, technical tips, and feelings about IT projects. I’ll cover 2 aspects the technical details, but also the methodologies of project management and general life dealing with IT purposes. So, A blog…