I'm way late to the T-SQL Tuesday party, but I'd like to add my opinions to giving back to the SQL community. I think most of the other authors have covered the "why," so I will talk in terms of the more pragmatic "how."

So how does one give back to the community? Well there are the traditional ways like answering questions on #sqlhelp, and the forums as well as speaking at meetings, conferences and SQL Saturdays. Those are all well and good, but there are a few other ways.

First, give …

Microsoft has open sourced part of the .NET framework. This is exciting news, although honestly not all that unprecedented. There was a time when AT&T defended the C language as its intellectual property. These days, the language is effectively in the public domain. (Note IANAL, the preceding was not legal advice. UNIX is a trademark of the Open Group). This lead to a few people asking if SQL Server would ever be open sourced. That answer is probably no for the time being. However, I do …

My name is Justin Dearing. I write software for a living. I also write software for free as hobby and for personal development. When I'm not writing code, I speak at user groups, events and conferences about code and code related topics. Once such event is SQL Saturday. I haven't spoken in a while because I became a dad in June. However, my daughter is 9 months old now and the weather is warm. I feel comfortable attending a regional SQL Saturday or two. So last night I submitted to SQL …

Recently I've been dealing with R and rapache at work. R is a language for statisticians. rapache is an apache module for executing R scripts in apache. Its like mod_perl or mod_php for R. I've been writing simple RESTful scripts that return graphics and JSON, and calling them from static html pages. I've been also using my MSDN Azure subscription to engage in R self study at home. In the spirit of my last post, I've posted the setup notes here to get you stated with a new Azure VM for running …

My company recently discovering the joys of using nginx as a reverse proxy cache server. This allowed us to significantly reduce the load on our application servers. Of course, as soon as we got this setup working nicely, a request for A/B testing came down the pipeline. There are some obstacles to conducting A/B testing while using nginx as a reverse proxy cache server. Obstacle 1: Lack of "sticky" sessions in free nginx product. While there is support for session affinity as …

I recently need to setup a CentOS 6.4 vm for development Java development. I wanted to be able to run Eclipse STS and on said vm and display the X11 Windows remotely on my Windows 7 desktop via XMing. I saw no reason for the CentOS VM to have a local X11 server. I'm quite comfortable with the Linux command line. I decided to share briefly on how to go from a CentOS minimal install to something actually useful for getting work done. /usr/bin/man The minimal install installs man pages, but not …

The other day I was mounting an ISO in Windows 8 via the Mount-DiskImage command. Since I was mounting the disk image in a script, I needed to know the drive letter it was mounted to so the script could access the files contained within. However, Mount-DiskImage was not returning anything. I didn't want to go through the hack of listing drives before and after I mounted the disk image, or explicitly assigning the drive letter. Both would leave me open to race conditions if another drive was …

In my last post, I talked about mounting disk images in Windows 8. Both Windows 8 and 2012 include native support for mounting ISO images as drives. However, in prior versions of Windows you needed a third party tool to do this. Since I have a preference for open source, my tool of choice before Windows 8 was WinCdEmu. Today, I decided to see if it was possible to determine the drive letter of an ISO mounted by WinCdEMu with PowerShell. A quick search of the internet revealed that WinCdEmu …

I recently wrote this script to let me quickly change the diff and merge tools TFS uses from PowerShell. I plan to make it a module and add it to the StudioShell Contrib package by Jim Christopher (blog|twitter). For now, I share it as a gist and place it on this blog. The script supports Visual Studio 2008-2012 and the following diff tools: The built-in tools WinMerge KDiff3 SemanticMerge BeyondCompare Standard BeyondCompare Pro Enjoy!

This was a quick and dirty thing born out of necessity, and need to make zip files of PoshRunner so I could make its chocolatey package. I made MSBuild tasks for creating 7zip and zip files out of the $(TargetDir) of an MSBuild project. There is a nuget package for it. Simply include it in your project via nuget and build it from the command line with the following command line: %windir%\microsoft.net\framework\v4.0.30319\msbuild __PROJECT_FOLDER__\__PROJECT_FILE__ /t:SevenZipBin,ZipBin This …