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Export all tables in an Access database to CSV

May 29, 2012

I don’t usually mess around with Access much, but when I do it’s usually to have it act as an intermediary data source while I’m getting data from one format to another. I had just such a problem to solve today, and the usually excellent out-of-the-box import/export processes let me down a little. …

Why have my visual state changes stopped working?

May 22, 2012

This took me a little while to work out, and searching for an answer didn’t help me out, so I thought it might be helpful to post this as a pointer to anyone else who encounters the same problem. My scenario: A Silverlight Windows Phone 7.1 App a control with a number of visual states applied to it Interaction …

Hooking into session start events in an HTTP module

Jan 25, 2012

According to the MSDN documentation you can’t handle Session Start events in an HTTP module. The reason for this is because when you are initialising an HTTP module you hook into events associated to the HttpApplication class, and HttpApplication doesn’t expose any events relating to the starting of …

Article on using SqlBulkCopy with POCOs

Jan 20, 2012

I realised that I never pushed this on my blog at all, so belatedly I will. Last year I wrote an article for Developer Fusion that discussed how you could make use of SqlBulkCopy to do high performance inserts when you were working with POCOs, rather than inserting them entity by entity using an ORM. The bottom line …

DynaCache- just like page output caching, but for classes

Jan 15, 2012

Anyone who has done any serious work with any ASP.NET based framework will know that page output caching is a great feature. For those not familiar with it, the basic premise is that it makes sure that the generation of content is done only once for a set of parameters, and that all subsequent requests with the same …

Tutorial: Using LIFTI in an MVC 3 web application

Jul 1, 2011

Updated 25/02/2012 - it was highlighted that some of the seach phrases used towards the end of this article were not returning the expected results - that was down to me making assumptions about which words would be stemmed - these examples have been updated. This tutorial will take you through an end-to-end …

Entity Framework Code First: "The path is not valid. Check the directory for the database"

Jun 27, 2011

If you create a new MVC application and try to go down the Code First with SQL Server Compact route, you might encounter this error when you first start the application: The path is not valid. Check the directory for the database.**[ Path = …\WebSample\App_Data\YourDatabase.sdf ] This error might be a surprise …

LIFTI XmlWordSplitter

Jun 10, 2011

The XmlWordSplitter is a new word splitter class in the latest release of LIFTI. I created it mainly because it was required for the persisted index sample, but it seemed too useful to keep out of the core framework. At a very high level the XmlWordSplitter just enumerates words contained within elements in a piece of …

Changes to the LIFTI API

Jun 8, 2011

This post relates to the breaking changes between version 0.4 and 0.5 of LIFTI. LIFTI is a full-text indexing library for .NET - find out more on its CodePlex site. The latest release of LIFTI has several breaking changes that will affect you, so I wanted to take some time to explain not only what they are, but why I …

Debugging "The agent process was stopped while the test was running"

Apr 25, 2011

I’ve encountered the unhelpful “The agent process was stopped while the test was running” MSTest error result a couple of times recently, and I thought that I’d share a few of my findings and approaches to debugging the unit tests that cause them. The MSTest “Error” Result In my …