Aaron Hoffman's Blog

Users in Google Chrome are great. I wish every browser had a similar feature. If you have multiple browser windows open at once running different users (one for work email, one for personal, for example) a downside is that whichever browser window you close last will be the User that is used when you open Chrome again. However, by modifying the taskbar shortcut you can override this functionality and always have your "Default" user be used. Right click on the Google Chrome taskbar icon, then right click on the "Google Chrome" entry in the popup menu. (Apparently Windows Print Screen does not work if the taskbar is active, so I had to take a picture on my phone...) In the Google Chrome Properties shortcut settings window that appears, append `  --profile-directory="Default" ` to the end of the Target value. And that's it. Now when this shortcut is used Google Chrome should open using the default profile no matter which User was associa

I recently refactored some code that was performing date arithmetic in SQL Server. The code was attempting to retrieve the "same day next year" by adding 365 days to the date provided. I was refactoring this logic out of SQL Server and in to .NET, and I was concerned that .NET's DateTime arithmetic wouldn't match SQL Server. I was pleasantly surprised that the results were the same. However, I should call out that perhaps in your situation adding 365 days to a given date is not appropriate for getting the "same day next year" value. I also compared this logic when preforming a "Add years + 1" and the results were also the same. (However, to be clear, adding 365 days differed from adding 1 year, but both SQL and .NET preformed the same given the method used.) source code:  https://gist.github.com/aaronhoffman/3d997390dab7f69e6597 results table: Method Value StartDate .NET Result SQL Result AddDays 365 2/27/2011 2/27/2012 2/27/2012 AddYears

When working with data with the intent to visualize, there are times when I'll want to group by every column in a table, separately, one at a time, to determine the possible values in that column. I do this often enough I created a simple SQL Query to build these group by statements for me: declare @table_name varchar(200) = 'dbo.mytablename' select 'select ' + c.name + ', count(1) cnt from ' + @table_name + ' group by ' + c.name + ' order by 2 ' from sys.columns c where c.object_id = object_id(@table_name) gist:  https://gist.github.com/aaronhoffman/d49d3705fd716b0fe6cb Hope this helps, Aaron

In ASP.NET MVC 5, user management changed significantly from ASP.NET MVC 4. This is the start of a series of blog posts on the topic (long overdue). This post is on the SQL that your website executes to initially create the identity (user, role) tables. The SQL the ApplicationUserManager and ApplicationSigninManager generate and execute is below: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[AspNetRoles] (     [Id] [nvarchar](128) NOT NULL,     [Name] [nvarchar](256) NOT NULL,     CONSTRAINT [PK_dbo.AspNetRoles] PRIMARY KEY ([Id]) ) go CREATE TABLE [dbo].[AspNetUserRoles] (     [UserId] [nvarchar](128) NOT NULL,     [RoleId] [nvarchar](128) NOT NULL,     CONSTRAINT [PK_dbo.AspNetUserRoles] PRIMARY KEY ([UserId], [RoleId]) ) go CREATE TABLE [dbo].[AspNetUsers] (     [Id] [nvarchar](128) NOT NULL,     [Email] [nvarchar](256),     [EmailConfirmed] [bit] NOT NULL,     [PasswordHash] [nvarchar](max),     [SecurityStamp] [nvarchar](max),     [PhoneNumber] [nvarchar](max),     [PhoneNumber

I have been writing code on the Microsoft Stack for around 10 years and have set up quite a few developer machines over the years. Starting with Windows XP, Visual Studio 2003, and SQL Server 2000, and on every version of Windows, VS, .NET, and SQL Server since. If there is a quirk with installing dev tools, I've likely run into it. I recently upgraded my primary dev machine to Windows 10, Visual Studio Enterprise 2015, and SQL Server 2014, and decided to capture the steps in this blog so I could point other people to it. Notice: Obviously, these are my preferences, and may not work for your situation. I am writing this post after running this setup for about a week* (edit: about 6 months now and still good). I will update this post as I continue to work with Windows 10. Objective From scratch, set up a developer machine with the following: 1. Windows 10 Pro 2. SQL Server 2014 Developer Edition 3. Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise Edition 4. Other dev tools (git, Sublime Tex

Windows 10, PowerShell, OneGet, PackageManagement, Chocolatey You may have tried the command: Import-Module -Name OneGet And received this message: Import-Module : The specified module 'OneGet' was not loaded because no valid module file was found in any module directory. But that's okay, because OneGet was renamed to PackageManagement. So just run this instead: Import-Module -Name PackageManagement And really, you probably don't even need to run that command at all. Sources: http://www.fixedbyvonnie.com/2014/11/5-minute-setup-using-oneget-chocolatey-windows-10/   http://blogs.technet.com/b/packagemanagement/archive/2015/05/05/10-things-about-oneget-that-are-completely-different-than-you-think.aspx

I've been doing a lot of work on site recently on a MacBook Pro, and, although I resisted at first, I've grown very fond of the Mac keyboard experience (although this could be attributed to Stockholm Syndrome). At home however I still use my Dell Windows Desktop for most of my Windows/.NET development. However, to keep the keyboard experience similar between my MacBook and my Windows Desktop, I bought a Mac Keyboard with Numpad for my Desktop (because customizing a MacBook keyboard to function like Windows is more difficult/impossible, luckily the other way around is not too difficult). I then needed to modify the default behaviors slightly to better simulate the Mac keyboard experience on Windows. The main differences are with the cmd+`key` functions vs ctrl+`key` and the location of the numpad operators. I used autohotkey to customize the default behavior and it works pretty well. Instructions on how to do this are below. Setup Steps: You'll need to install autohotke