To get free disk space for all physical drives on a machine we can use xp_fixeddrives extended stored procedure. An interesting this about this procedure is that it is not documented in books online.
EXEC xp_fixeddrives

Here is output on my machine.

You’ve got to love sys views in SQL Server. While learning about performance tuning on SQL Server 2008 I wanted to get a list of all Indexes on my database and the answer was as simple as it can be. Here i a statement which can be used to get a list of all indexes [...]

I was recently helping Nosh with a LINQ To SQL query where he wanted the resulting T-SQL query to have CASE statements. Having CASE statements in T-SQL queries is a common scenario but how do we it in LINQ To SQL .After some investigation I found the solution which I am presenting here using an [...]

This is where reflection comes in handy. The following code snippet shows you how to get the name of executing assembly.
string assemblyName;
assemblyName = System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().FullName;
Console.WriteLine(assemblyName);

 
Output for the above code returns the fully qualified name as shown below

 
To just get the Assembly name we can use this snippet.
string assemblyName;
assemblyName = System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetName().Name;
Console.WriteLine(assemblyName);

Here is the output.

I’ll be honest that I was not much excited about Internet Explorer 8 until it went RTM. There is only so much beta software one can take. But today when IE8 went RTM I decided to install it on my main machine. This post talks about my first experience with the browser.
Installation of IE8 [...]

To find out the space used by a table we can use sp_spaceused procedure. Most of the times sp_spaceused will give correct information. Why do I say most of the time? Well consider this example. I just inserted a large amount of data in Orders table in Northwind database and ran sp_spaceused.
EXEC sp_spaceused ‘Orders’
which returns [...]

The title says it all.
Here is the Link.

Every object in SQL Server database has an Object Id which is used extensively by SQL Server for most operations. There are times when we would like to know what the object ID is for a particular object. In this example I will show you two ways to retrieve Object Id. My examples will retrieve [...]

In this walkthrough I will show you how to use Red Gate SQL Data Generator to generate test data for a database. While writing software which interacts with a database developers often write scripts to insert some data. Usually this data is not big enough to find performance bottlenecks and/or issues with presenting data on [...]

Ok, so you’ve seen Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and you thought the technology looked interesting. You know your applications are starting to look dated, you understand WPF has matured, now in its 3rd release; but life gets in the way and you haven’t had the chance to get down and dirty with it yet. So [...]

This script returns all default constraints on a table in a SQL Server 2008 database. It gives me the name and definition of the constraints on Person.Address table in Adventure Works database. You can substitute the table name with any other table to get the constraints for that table.
SELECT [name],
[...]

In this post I will document my experience of installing Oracle SOA Suite on Windows XP. No I am not switching and I’m still a Microsoft developer by heart. But I do feel that for me to improve my craft I must also understand how things are done in other camps such as Oracle, SUN, [...]