Author Archives: Greg

IT Toolbox: TechNet Magazine February 2012

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Greg

The February IT Toolbox column is up on the TechNet Magazine website. In February, I covered these products: smtp4dev: A local smtp server to test out applications and email messages DisplayFusion Pro: A full-featured, multimonitor management application PureText: Copy/paste text … Continue reading →

Posted in Microsoft TechNet | Leave a comment

C#: Export a List of Objects to CSV with LINQ, Attributes, and Generics

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Greg

Have you ever needed to transform data from in-memory C# objects to a CSV flat-file of a specific format?  Here’s an easy way to get the job done with C#, LINQ, and Generics. First you need the Attribute you will … Continue reading →

Posted in Attributes, C#, Generics, LINQ | Leave a comment

IT Toolbox: TechNet Magazine January 2012

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Greg

The January IT Toolbox column is up on the TechNet Magazine website. In January, I covered these products: SQL Source Control: Version your T-SQL within SSMS Bins: Taskbar Organizer for Windows MD5 Checksum Tool: Free MD5 checksum tool Check it … Continue reading →

Posted in Microsoft TechNet | Leave a comment

IT Toolbox: TechNet Magazine December 2011

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Greg

The December IT Toolbox column is up on the TechNet Magazine website. In December, I covered these products: SSMS Tools Pack: Extend SQL Server Management studio Network Inventory Advisor: Automated system and device inventory application Check it out and let … Continue reading →

Posted in Microsoft TechNet | Leave a comment

IT Toolbox: TechNet Magazine November 2011

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Greg

The November IT Toolbox column is up on the TechNet Magazine website. In November, I covered these products: MaxiVista: Extend Windows’ desktop onto another physical machine EaseUS Todo Backup: An alternate backup solution for Windows desktops Check it out and … Continue reading →

Posted in Microsoft TechNet | Leave a comment

IT Toolbox: TechNet Magazine October 2011

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Greg

The October IT Toolbox column is up on the TechNet Magazine website. This month I covered three products: up.time: Up/down service, server and network device monitoring Synergy: Software-based KVM Iperf: Test your network’s performance Check it out and let me … Continue reading →

Posted in Microsoft TechNet | Leave a comment

C# : String Extension to Parse Enums

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Greg

It seems to me that there is too much typing involved in parsing a string as an Enum type. Here’s a quick string extension method to turn it into a simpler one liner: public static T EnumParse<T>(this string input, bool … Continue reading →

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IT Toolbox: TechNet Magazine September 2011

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Greg

The September IT Toolbox column is up on the TechNet Magazine website. This month I covered these two products: Lansweeper: Hardware, software, and device inventory management ipMonitor: Detailed monitoring of your servers, systems, and network devices. Check it out and … Continue reading →

Posted in Microsoft TechNet | Leave a comment

ASP.Net: App_Offline.htm as a Maintenance Page

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Greg

While Googling about, I came upon an oldy-but-goody, that apparently has been available since the release of ASP.Net 2.0: App_Offline.htm. An undocumented feature, you can copy a file called app_offline.htm into the root of your .Net website and the application … Continue reading →

Posted in ASP.Net, IIS, MVC | Leave a comment

SSIS: Use Two OLE DB Destination Adapters to Catch Insertion/Constraint Errors

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Greg

If you are using SQL Server Integration Server (SSIS) packages to insert large volumes of data, you have undoubtedly encountered incorrectly formatted or typed data in your data source including precision errors, conversion errors, and primary key/foreign key constraint errors etc. To … Continue reading →

Posted in MS SQL Server, SSIS | 1 Comment