Software Tip: How To Export A Table To XML File In SQL Server Management Studio

There doesn’t seem to be a User Interface for exporting a table to an XML file in SQL Server Management Studio.  It seems that Microsoft completely overlooked the case when you just need to do a one time export[Read more →]


Save Your Maxtor One Touch 4

If you happen to have a Maxtor One Touch that is going or has seemingly gone bad, don’t fear.  Your data is most likely safe.  It’s just that something has gone wrong with the controller card in the unit.  For a few months my One Touch was hit or miss (probably 1 out of 5 times it would actually work).  Finally I got tired of it and cracked open the case.  I disconnected the Sata drive from the card and connected it to the Sata controller on my motherboard.  After I booted up my machine and opened explorer, I was able to drill down into the drive and see all my data!

Software Tip: Linked Item Fails to Preview in Sitecore

Recently I encountered a situation where a linked item would only show in preview mode when the preview date / time was prior to 12/15/09 12:00pm.  There were no publishing restrictions on my linked item.  So I was very perplexed.  After a few fruitless days of exchanging posts on the support site my issue was escalated to the next level and I was able to talk to a support rep.  After a few minutes of showing him what was going on, he figured out that it must be a publishing restriction on an item in the path of the linked item.  So we walked back up the item path in the content tree checking publishing restrictions for each node as we went along.  Finally we got to the Home node and low and behold someone had set it to expire on 12/15/09 12:00pm.  After we removed that expiration, previewing worked as expected. 

 HTH!

Software Tip: Add Machine Name to Log4Net Filename

If you have multiple servers logging to the same folder, you can create unique file names by adding the server name to the file that it logs to by changing your log4netConfig.xml file to something like: 

<file type=”log4net.Util.PatternString” value=”logs/MultiServerApp.%property{log4net:HostName}.log” />

Beware! SQL Server Stops Execution on Recompile

Can anyone tell me why Microsoft SQL Server stops executing a stored procedure when it is recompiled?  This is dangerous behavior unlike any other software code release system I’ve ever seen.   Through all my years of SQL development this thought never crossed my mind.  [Read more →]