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LessThanDot

A decade of helpful technical content

This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.

Compiled list of C# + .Net Features

We have talked about doing this at work for a while, so I finally sat down this weekend and tried to make a list of C# features that the team could share. We intend to use this to help gauge who the best people are to ask questions in different areas (C# isn’t our only list) as well as a list of things to learn when you’re bored (after crossing off all the ones you know).

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5 Questions with Chris Yates

It’s time for me to interview another outstanding member of the SQL Server community, Chris Yates (blog | twitter | linkedin). I want to say Chris and I “met” on Twitter first, but we have met in person, and he’s as awesome as they come. He’s always cheering someone on to reach a goal, he’s always positive, and he has a wicked sense of humor. He didn’t know what a Culver’s Butter Burger was, but I’ve corrected that injustice!

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Advanced Smoke Testing with PhantomJS

Recently I found myself wanting a new kind of safety net. There are any number of surprise problems that can show up in front-end development, from mistyped image URLs to bad output when the minification script barfs to the unexpected surprises after adding new dependencies. As an application scales from smaller to larger, it becomes even more time consuming to check all of the interfaces and look for little things like 404s, script errors, and odd side effects.

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Web API 2 – don't get caught with your parameters down

Hi, A quick post for anyone else who has been literally dying from a lack of sleep trying to workout something that should be fairly simple. Quick background: I got interested in Web API after I decided to build a friend a simple booking website driven by HTML5, jquery and originally an ASP.NET/c# .NET 4 Web Service. Having tested it out I came across a CORS related issue and being very impatient I just could not be bothered to work around it (and lets face it, if you have to do that with CORS its a hack in my book, it just doesn’t feel right in the dynamic world of Web API 2.

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Windows 10, how I doth hateth thee mostest

How’s it going folks, thought I’d get another post written up before I switch over to video logs in the future (watch this space). So I don’t really need to do a big introduction to Windows 10, there was a lot of buzz going about the internet not least due in part to the upgrade icon that appeared in the notification tray (from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1) and like many people I became curious as to what exactly Windows 10 would mean to me and the rest of the world.

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Nancy, Get, Post, Bind and javascript

Something that always seemed to lack a bit of documentation was the Bind method. I know it works with a Post but it also works with a Get. Both are slightly different in how they pass their information to the server. You don’t see it when you have a form and do a normal submit though. In a RESTfull application you would use a POST to create a new object and a GET for getting information and not changing anything serverside.

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Being Better

“In order to make delicious food, you must eat delicious food.” – Jiro Ono, the owner of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a Michelinthree-star restaurant, and a relentless perfectionist on a quest to make the best sushi on earth.    “To run faster, you need to run fast.” – Tracey Gessner, a complete bad-ass runner I follow on Twitter, who recently ran a Boston Marathon qualifying time. She tweeted this one day about speed workouts.

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Announcing SQL Saturday Minnesota #453 Pre-Conference Seminars!

Before we know it, October will be upon us and it will be time for another SQL Saturday Minnesota! If you have not yet registered for this free day of training on October 10th, please visit the site and sign up now! Since no SQL Saturday Minnesota would be complete without a full slate of pre-cons, PASSMN and the organizers of SQL Saturday #453 are proud to announce the addition of four day long pre-cons to be held on Friday, October 9th from 9AM – 5PM.

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5 Questions with Russ Thomas

My 5 Questions series continues with Russ Thomas (blog | twitter | linkedin). At SQL Saturday Portland 2013, Russ asked me and Grant Fritchey to sit in on his presentation, “Verbal Judo for the DBA”. Grant and I had fun taking on roles with other members of the audience, talking through situations, learning how to communicate. I thought, “This guy knows how to teach people!” As I’ve gotten to know Russ over the last couple of years, I’ve realized he knows a lot more than that!

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5 Questions with Mala Mahadevan

My 5 Questions series continues with one of my favorite people, Mala (blog | twitter | linkedin). She and I met at PASS Summit a few years ago, but it was on SQL Cruise Alaska 2012 that we really got to know each other. Mala is a little firecracker. She’s a great DBA, a long-time PASS chapter leader and regional mentor, a world traveler, and brilliantly curious. I always look forward to seeing her at events.

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