Recently I was trying to find duplicate records in a table. The records are considered duplicate if two columns in different records has the same value. For example if first name and last name is same in record1 and record2, they considered as duplicate.

The below query will help to find the duplicate records.

SELECT fname, lname, COUNT(*) AS DuplicateCount FROM [Users]
GROUP BY fname, lname HAVING COUNT(*) > 1
ORDER BY COUNT(*), fname.

(I know this is pretty simple one, but most of the time you struggle for the simplest query :) so thought of sharing it)

String.Replace is not case insensitive, so what is the best way to do it. There are several ways, if I think of the quickest one it is using regex.

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;string 
string str = "The quick brown Fox jumps over the lazy dog";
string strReplace = "cat";
string result = Regex.Replace(str, "fox", strReplace, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

-Rujith

I had lot of trouble in my last project due the html body onload event. The aspx pages were relying lot on this event ( I agree its not the best way, but we don't have the budget and time for to rebuild the entire site). These sites were AJAXyfied recently using Telerik RadControls, and were not working in FireFox. I must admin Telerik controls are really good, its makes your job very easy in AJAX world. Though I don't like their quarterly release idea. YES, they release a new version every quarter...

So the problem in AJAX is, the page can be loaded asynchronously, so when the onload event on the body is fired the controls may not be ready, so you get null exceptions.

The best way I found is to use the built in ‘pageLoad()’ method(this is a reserved method). This will be called once all AJAX load events are finished. Remember you can use this only in AJAX pages. Also this is consistent in different browsers. (If you are going with FireFox you have to use window.load=function() instead onload=function())

Coding is fun

-Rujith

Maximum request length matters when you want to allow upload/download of large files.

This is one of the major change in IIS7. In previous version the default is 4MB, in IIS7 its 28.6MB. So when you deploy your ASP.NET application you will see that it will work for files larger than 4MB, but will give as soon as you cross the 28MB.

In IIS 7, the attribute has been changed to maxAllowedContentLength and it has to appear in <system.webServer> section (as for all IIS 7 settings). The complete attribute will look something like this…

<system.webServer>
<security >
  <requestFiltering>
    <requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength="3072000000" />
  </requestFiltering>
</security>

…

I ran into trouble during deploying a WCF service on IIS7 with https.

There's a great resource on all things WCF Security related here

http://www.codeplex.com/WCFSecurity

This helped me a lot.

When you are working with Active Directory the following may be useful,

Import and export directory objects – CSVDE & LDIFDE
ex: from the command prompt try CSVDE -f C:\Exportfile.csv
more help is available in this KB article.

Another useful utility while working with Active directory and LDAP(Light Weight Directory Access Protocol) is ADSI Edit (adsiedit.msc). Nice link if you want to know in detail.

Also found this interesting link with attributes and its description for AD Users. see here. And check this script to list all User object attributes in active directory schema.