Database Continuous Integration with SQL CI and Jenkins

Continuous integration (CI) is the process of ensuring that all code and related resources in a development project are integrated...

How to Create Ten 200GB Test Databases in 60 Seconds

In a recent survey run on community site SQL Server Central, 58% of respondents admitted that their test database is...

Writing Build vNext tasks for Visual Studio Online

Hosted TFS, now called Visual Studio Online (VSO), has a new way of writing build processes called Build vNext. Agent...

The Brian Keller VM – Try out Microsoft’s ALM stack easily

Why do I need this? Microsoft sells a range of tools to support a project from ideation to release and...

Metrics – A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing (or ‘Why you’re not clever enough to interpret metrics data’)

At RedGate Software, I work on a .NET obfuscator called SmartAssembly. Various features of it use a database to store...

Breaking through the class sealing

Do you understand ‘sealing’ in C#? Somewhat? Anyway, here’s the lowdown. I’ve done this article from a C# perspective, but...

How big is a string in .NET?

Typically the size of an object is 8 bytes for the object header plus the sum of the fields.  Consider...

Scrum: Keeping Kosher doesn't make you Jewish

Our development team has started using Scrum.  We’re only 4 weeks in, so it would be premature to make a...

Nullable Structs – An interesting ‘Gotcha’

One of the interesting new features in C# 2.0 was nullable valuetypes.  Using these, you can set valuetypes to a...

First Steps with .NET Reflector

If you are new to using .NET Reflector, or you are wondering whether it would be useful to you, you'll...

A Quick .NET Puzzle

Just a quick .NET puzzle.  Does this application ever throw that ApplicationException?  If so, why? using System;using System.Threading; class Program{    static long Num...

Order of Construction

  For me, inheritance is often a headache.  In particular, in what order is everything initialized?  Consider this short C#...

Using the Exception Hunter Command Line to find All Methods that throw a given Exception

Red-Gate’s new .NET tool – Exception Hunter – shows you the exceptions that can be thrown by a .NET method....