The Brief

Stop me if this sounds familiar.

This is the accumulated hands-on knowledge of days of work and hours of technical Kerberos videos that I didn't (and still do not) understand.

I exported my bookmarks in HTML format from FireFox and wanted to do some processing on them, but parsers like the HTML Agility Pack could not handle it properly because the format does not include DT (Url blocks) or DD (Description blocks) end tags, and that in turn results in massively nested XPath lists.

Continuing on from earlier, after I discovered that FireFox includes far more bookmark information in its native format (JSON) I wanted to create a parser for that instead. Normally PowerShell provides you two simple ways of doing this: ConvertFrom-Json and ConvertTo-Json.

Today I needed to modify a function to remove some bad files that were causing an import to fail across a long list of servers (using Invoke-Command). Here's a sample I've constructed to show and test the removal part.

I've tried a few different options for FTP with PowerShell and the best one so far is WinSCP with its .NET assembly.

This is something to be very, very wary of when storing data blobs in SQL Server. If you compare varbinary fields they will match when one field has one or more extra zero bytes at the end, even if they are different lengths. Observe:

This is easy.

PowerShell error handling is great but becomes more complicated as your functions become more complicated and interdependent. For a while I used -ErrorAction Stop on everything because I was available to immediately deal with unforseen problems, but when functions call functions sometimes you don't really want them to just stop, you want to continue or possibly parse the output later.

I use one-way transactional SQL Server replication to ship data out from a source server to multiple destinations, and recently added a publication with a vertically filtered article; that is to say a table where I exclude a column from replication because I do not want it sent to the subscribers.

I had an error today where Business Intelligence Design Studio was running an SQL Server Integration Services package (I'm spelling it all out so search can find it) and failing with an error.

I encountered an error where an SQL CLR that had been in use for a long time was triggering this error from SQL Server:

I had replication errors recently with some subscriptions that were set up with replication support only (manually created and populated destination tables). These are transactional push subscriptions that are not updateable (i.e. they are one way only from the source to the destinations and the destinations must keep the same keys as the source).

After setting up transactional replication on a set of servers with @sync_type = "replication support only" I was receiving errors on validation where the row count was correct but the checksum was not. Meanwhile SQL Data Compare was telling me the tables on each server were exactly the same. This was caused by two issues.

No solutions today, only sadness and finger pointing.

Today I received this message while running a PowerShell script on a remote server:

I had a nasty message pop up in the middle of running an SSIS package with DTEXEC. That same package had been working fine for a long time, and was running in BIDS as recently as yesterday on the same machine with no problem.

I was scratching my head looking at a complex .NET object and wondering how to get all of the values out of it. For example:

This is a funny video I haven't published here before; illustrating what happens when the needs of developers butt heads with the policies of sysops and management. This doesn't reflect a single situation or company but generalises what we've all been through at one time or another.

I have an array of objects and I want to pull out a set where a property matches any entry in an array of strings: with wildcards. I couldn't find a solution anywhere (or even others having the same issue), so here's the thought process I went through.