Meng Lin

Tech advocate of good engineering practices and new technologies

Windows Services Kickstarter in Powershell

Since some legacy Windows services are getting more and more unstable and fall apart without any means of recovery, a kickstarter is needed to ensure those important(?) services don't just disappear quietly without any struggle. The idea is to use a combination of Powershell script and Task Scheduler to trigger...


DiskPart Command in Windows

As an automation process for disk configuration and manipulation, using the command line DiskPart is a must as a SysAdmin. To get you started DiskPart allows us to manage disks, partitions or volumes just like Disk Management tool does. To get started, type in cmd after start + r to...


Pivot Tables in SQL

I was working on SSRS to generate a report for a client. But instead of the conventional way, they'd like what was data in the rows to be displayed as column name. Assuming the problem is same as the following. The inventory system holds a list of products for each...


Configure NuGet in Version Control

When enjoying the convenience NuGet brings us, it is easy to forget the fact that the references will come back to bite you the hardest, specially when working with version control. This time, I hit a jackpot checkout my project from TFS in a new device, and realise all my...


Setup a Subversion Workflow

In an multi-developer environment, version control turns out to be a very important thing to do before crack on coding. There are certain options while setting up svn repository: Use public hosting service, e.g. google code Set up local repository Set up network share By comparing the usability and impact,...