blog
My blog of techy stuff, ranging around SQL (SQL Server, that is), C# and .net, JavaScript and a smattering of stuff about the Orchard CMS (that powers my site) as I get more familiar with it. There's the occasional non-technical post when something is of interest to me that I feel is worth sharing, but they should be few and far between
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Using robots.txt to block indexing isn't always right, and how to fix it with Orchard CMS
Since Google started revamping their webmaster tools recently it's made seeing some of the issues they consider my site to have more apparent. One of these is "Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt" …
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Creating a template for 'dotnet new' for Microsoft.Build.Traversal
In a recent post I described using Microsoft.Build.Traversal in lieu of solutions for building your projects, with steps to create a sample solution and the Traversal project using the .NET Core …
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Hiding empty years in the Orchard blog archive list
Because I had a bit of a stop/start relationship with my blog for the best part of a decade there are a lot of years where there aren't any posts. This kinda filled up the "Archives" list I've got …
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Using Microsoft.Build.Traversal in lieu of solutions for building your projects
Somewhere recently I came across a reference to the Microsoft.Build.Traversal SDK which has been sat in an open tab in my browser ever since. Traversal:
Supports creating traversal projects which …
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Fixing up the archive counts in Orchard
For reasons best known to itself, sometimes Orchard gets a little count happy with the number of posts in a given archive year/month and over exaggerates the number of posts present. Fortunately …
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Don't use 'SET DATEFORMAT' and don't manipulate dates as strings
There are two things that're a bad idea when it comes to dates and SQL Server (that I'm blogging about right now, there are surely many more than that!), using 'SET DATEFORMAT' to alter the default …
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Using the new Microsoft Library Manager to Bootstrap a project
The latest release of Visual Studio 2017 (15.8) comes with Microsoft Library Manager, or LibMan for short, there's also a CLI available and if you want to read about it from the horses mouth …
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Using Common Table Expressions to explode recipes - Part 2 - Getting the ingredients
A Brief Recap
In the last part of this article I showed a table structure for recipes and their ingredients. There are two kinds of ingredients that a recipe can contain, raw ingredients (e.g. …
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Using Common Table Expressions to explode recipes - Part 1 - The CTE
A lot of the examples that you see for using Common Table Expressions (CTEs) in SQL Server, particularly recursive ones use examples that are around user hierarchies - showing ways to find all the …
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Using Sequence Numbers in SQL Server
Microsoft introduced the concept of Sequence Numbers in SQL Server 2012 which are:
... a user-defined schema-bound object that generates a sequence of numeric values according to the specification …