There was a question I answered the other day where someone complained that the rowcount was always 0. Below is a simplified version of the query, can you tell why @SomeCount will be 0?

declare @SomeCount int

select 1
union all
select 2

print '1'
select @SomeCount = @@rowcount 

select @SomeCount 

The value that the @SomeCount parameter returns will be 0 because print resets the value of @@ROWCOUNT to...

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago I introduced myself to the world of the world of Git and Github. And I did not see much wrong with it. But over the last couple of years I have become very frustrated with the slowness of SVN - or it could just be TortoiseSVN. Anyway, I thought it was time for a change. I am still a lonely developer in a non-IT oriented workplace, so I mainly use source control for Backup as well as for easy Continuous Integration. Every time I commit somewhere, a server starts to build the project an...

Personally I have been sold on F# for a long time but some people however will need a lot of convincing before they move out of their comfort zone. Hopefully after reading this you will be more inclined to try it out. Imagine you were given a directory full of files that did not have any file extensions and were told to figure out the file extension for every file. Picture how you might do this in VB or C#. Now take a look at this:

(*
Notice how we don't need to specify the type for filePaths?
The compiler will infer the type based ...

For the last few months I've had the pleasure of working with NDepend version 3. Most of my development at home is on linux these days, so I haven't used it as much as I'd like, but I have been using it to poke around in various codebases and see what the new Visual Studio integration is all about. The last version integrated with Visual Studio, technically speaking, but it didn't seem nearly as thorough as what I've seen in version 3. I suspect the improved extensibility model in VS 2010 has a lot to do with this, but can't confirm (I haven't tried it with...

I wanted to run a query from SQL Express against Excel, and I found this:

SELECT *
FROM OPENROWSET('Microsoft.Ace.OLEDB.14.0', 
   'Excel 8.0;DATABASE=c:\docs\testdata.xls', 'Select * from [Sheet1$]')

Which was just what I wanted, a way to select data from Excel. But it did not work.

Msg 7403, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 The OLE DB provider "Microsoft.Ace.OLEDB.14.0" has not been registered.

It appears that Microsoft.Ace.OLEDB.14.0 is registered as Microsoft.Ace.OLEDB.12.0...