If you try to backup your SQL Server database to a Windows shared folder on a network PC, you're in for a little bit of a surprise. The following command is a valid statement but SQL Server will throw you an ugly exception. There are a couple of solutions you can workaround the problem.

Subversion needs the svnserve.exe executable running at all times to be able to perform source control operations. It's impractical on a Windows machine to have a command running at all times because as soon as you log out, the command gets killed. As of the new Subversion 1.4, the svnserve.exe can now run natively as Windows service...

Microsoft finally put together a powerful command line tool for Windows that makes Bash on Linux looks like small potato. The new powershell runs .NET and understands objects when you pipe from one process to another. Given the power and the things you can do with powershell, Microsoft is rightfully cautious about hackers and script abuse. PowerShell, by default, is very secure and disallows any powershell scripts from running. (security)

Text encoding tells the system how a character is represented in bits and bytes. There are several hundred different known encodings. Sometimes you need to convert from one encoding to another because your application can only read certain data encoded in a certain way. Here's how to do it using iconv for Windows and Linux.

Starting with SQL Server 2005, you can now use Snapshot Isolation to eliminate blocking READ operations and get rid of those pesky SQL locks. Snapshot Isolation is a better choice for OLTP operations where you expect a large number of reads and moderate writes. Your system will be able to scale much higher. Here's how to set your SQL Server database to use the new isolation level...

Backup procedures tend to use the Windows Scheduler to backup files but IT Administrators often forget to backup the scheduled task itself. Here's how to backup your Windows Scheduled Tasks.

I use RSS Feeds quite a bit. It's neat to pull interesting blogs or news feed into my site. Sometimes the RSS feed provided is too long or the default format is not as nice. So I decided to write my own XSLT template to transform the XML from the RSS feed.

When you're testing a web site on IIS either on your own development PC or on staging, you need a way to generate a self-signing certificate if you don't want to put out a few hundred dollars. In the past, Microsoft made available a tool called SelfSSL inside the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit. The tool works but there is a bug when you try to create more than one certificate on the same machine. You keep losing the first certificate you created. The better way is to use the new Microsoft SSL Diagnostics tool ... (ASP.NET, IIS)

Build Adobe Flash applications rapidly using Adobe Flex Builder IDE. This article shows you how to install Adobe Flex Builder 2...

How to create a simple Flash application using Adobe Flex Builder 2. In this example, I'll show how easy it is to create a simple retirement calculator...