Arogl Darthu's Blog

A while ago I grabbed a WCF Membership example from here. Now that I've been reading some more on WCF, I stumbled upon the following article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa355056.aspx

How do you see this? Have you ever had these 'errors from IDisposable' surface in production? Did you start rewriting every client call with try-catch-finally? Personally I'm a bit appalled by the idea... Using the using statement keeps the code clean.

So I started searching for a solution. This article (WCF Gotcha #1) seems to provide a nice solution, but it's not exactly what I was hoping for.

Ideas are very welcome! Read More

As we all know, the LEN function in T-SQL returns the character length and at that ignores the trailing blanks... So, how to return the length including these trailing blanks? I experimented a little and found that all you have to do is CAST to the appropriate MAXed variant of your datatype. So just try the following:
This results in:


So... just cast your expression to NVARCHAR(MAX) or VARCHAR(MAX) where appropriate and you'll get the right length

Unable to connect to this Team Foundation Server...

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 pops up a nice dialog with three possible reasons for failure:

• The Team Foundation Server name, port number or protocol is incorrect.
• The Team Foundation Server is offline.
• Password is expired or incorrect.

They should have added: Your machine.config contains an error. In this case a coworker added an appSettings section to the machine.config. He added valid xml; no errors at all. So why blame the config settings you might ask...

Well, apparently the appSettings node must be located below the configSections node. If not, all kind of strange things (like not being able to connect to TFS) will occur.