#Grab Some Coffee

A 'Hello World' for VSTS Extensions

So if you haven't heard yet VSO Extensions are now in a private preview where you can sign up to get into the preview on extensions integration site. These extensions in the shortest sentence a supported way of doing customizations to VSO that will replace any of the "hacky" extensions that you may be playing around with at the moment like Tiago Pascal's Task Board Enhancer or maybe you have even created your own following similar steps to what I show in my TFS 2013 Customization book.

Posted on June 18, 2015 - Azure Free Stuff Getting Started GitHub Projects Grab Some Coffee Rangers Research Visual Studio Team Services VSTS / TFS VSTS Extensions

They said Select * was bad but...

So speaking to any smart database people they will generally tell you that the SELECT * FROM ... is a bad idea and should not be used. Today (well would of been if I didn't procrastinate) I spent many hours debugging something from the wrong places because I used SELECT *. Below is what I found out =). Rennie Moodley helped me understand what was happening after I figured out where the problem was, helped me create the sample code below and then the 2 of us and Christopher Swart poked at and improve the sample and found some more weirdness which you'll also see below.

Posted on April 09, 2015 - Data Grab Some Coffee SQL Server T-SQL