Recently, while working on a personal project, I found myself needing a lightweight way to deploy database changes to multiple environments. In the past I have used a wide range of methods, ranging from applying the changes manually to applying changes via a diff tool (SQL Compare), to automatically applying manually created change scripts, to automatically applying diff scripts that were automatically generated, to working directly in production..er, pretend you didn't see that one.

This is one of those things that I only need once every several months and always forget how to do. Working with custom XML in Visual Studio is a whole lot easier with intellisense. Schema errors are highlighted, enumerated values are displayed, and the amount of typing goes from full tag names to just a few characters followed by tab to complete.

There are a few ways to do this, but if you have a schema (XSD) for the file, then here are the steps to make the magic happen.

Monday I caught the Food Fight Show, discussing The Phoenix Project and featuring Gene Kim (site|twitter), Jez Humble (blog|twitter), and Matthew Zeier (

The basic Azure Worker Role consists of a run method, an endless loop, and a sleep statement. Earlier this week, Magnus Martensson walked through implementing a more sophisticated wait object than the generic Thread.Sleep call. Which reminded me of a problem inherent in the basic Microsoft template.

Every exit is a crash.

The b...

The technical sphere seems to have very mixed definitions for the terms "Quality" and "Quality Assurance". The other day I was reading a post by Devlin Liles (blog|twitter) in response to a presentation he had attended (Quality Assurance–The Team Approach). While I agreed with a lot of his opinions, as I st...