Ciao! I’m Jason.

I'm a Cloud Solution Architect, Speaker, Teacher, Learner, Engineer, Craftsman, Whovian with his head in the Cloud.

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Handling Events on System.Diagnostics.Process

Handling Events on System.Diagnostics.Process

If you want to handle events when working with System.Diagnostics.Process -- for example, the Exited event -- you have to first enable the raising of events using the EnableRaisingEvents property on Process...

Using PDB (Debug Symbols) When Compiling in Release Mode

Using PDB (Debug Symbols) When Compiling in Release Mode

Bit by yet another not-so-well documented "feature" in Microsoft .Net.  We were compiling in release mode for QA, since we've seen other behavioral differences between debug and release.  We also wanted to emit the line numbers in the stack trace so the engineers would have a better idea of what caused the error. We added the...

Unsigned Integers in SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, and DB2

Unsigned Integers in SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, and DB2

A recent project required the need to store an unsigned 64-bit integer in a SQL Server database table. BIGINT won't cut it because BIGINT has a max value of 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (signed 64-bit integer), and the unsigned 64-bit integer's max value is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. The solution...

Hypervisor and Host Upgrade at Milestone

Hypervisor and Host Upgrade at Milestone

It was time to upgrade the virtual machine host at Milestone. Since most of our critical systems are hosted, the server(s) here didn't need to be anything to extreme. The servers in house are development and test lab related. The goals for the upgrade were to:

  • Upgrade the hardware
  • Go Green
  • Experiment with various hypervisors to see which ones can be used in SOHO environments with low investment, low TCO, high ROI, and little or no headache when it comes to install and maintenance.

Installing CentOS/RedHat 5.5 on Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

Installing CentOS/RedHat 5.5 on Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

CentOS/Red Hat 5.5 on Hyper-V R2 seems to work quite well. The trick is to download the Linux Integration Services from Microsoft and follow the install guide before creating the VM. The guide provides specific installation guidelines for creating/configuring the VM and installing the OS itself...

Installing MySQL 5.5 on Mac OS X 10.6

Installing MySQL 5.5 on Mac OS X 10.6

Or should I say "unable to install MySQL 5.5 on Mac OS X". My first attempt at installing MySQL on Mac was with MySQL 5.1 on Snow Leopard. That worked as expected and without any issues. MySQL 5.5, however, was a bit tricky...

Identifying Datastores Configured in VMware Server 2.0

Identifying Datastores Configured in VMware Server 2.0

I ran into the need to start a VMware Server 2.0 virtual machine from the command line. The vmrun command uses the data store name to locate the vmx file. Unfortunately, the system documentation wasn't readily available, so I needed to determine what stores were configured...

Simulating Latency and Bandwidth Restrictions in WCF

Simulating Latency and Bandwidth Restrictions in WCF

If you're developing WCF applications that will run over a WAN, VPN, or the public internet, then network bandwidth and latency is a concern. Messages take longer to transmit over these networks than over your local area network (LAN). As such, part of your development and testing needs to include testing the application over these typed of "slower" connection...

Close 'Em Plug-In For Visual Studio

Close 'Em Plug-In For Visual Studio

If you're an Eclipse or Netbeans user, you'll be very familiar with this topic. These IDEs automatically close braces, parenthesis, quotes, and brackets -- ( {},[],(),"",'' ) -- for you as you type in the code editors. It may sound like laziness, but it can actually save you debug/troubleshooting time as it ensures (well, helps to ensure) that for every open you have a corresponding close.