IDENTITY columns can be a real pain in the ass when data gets out of sync. GUIDs are generally a much better option when it comes to replication, but you aren’t always in control of data structures and sometimes you inherit old systems that weren’t designed to be replicated. [Read More]

I’ve been doing some work with SQL Server replication over the last few days, and in order to acheive this I was replicating between one of our DB servers and a SQL Server Express instance on my desktop. To my surprise, setting up remote connections to Express is actually a... [Read More]

Although .NET compiles into binary .dlls, these assemblies are extremely easy to reverse-engineer using Reflector, or any other decent Reflection tool. Although it’s not completely secure, the simplest way to protect your code is to run it through the free obfuscation tool that comes with Visual Studio: Dotfuscator Community Edition.... [Read More]

Knowing how to use PerfMon can be absolutely critical when faced with unknown performance problems on large information systems. When you’re faced with a performance bottleneck in a large server farm, it can be very difficult to track down issues as minor hiccups can have knock-on effects that are far... [Read More]

I hadn’t noticed it before, but ASP.NET provides a really simple way to encrypt your cookies. Cryptography is a field best left to the experts, but for simple encryption purposes this method is perfectly adequate. [Read More]