System.Blog.Martens.Ben

The Tech Blog of Ben Martens

Azure Data Explorer Functions and Control Commands

A new employee on our team recently went through the Pluralsight Kusto course and gave it the thumbs...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 12/06/2018

Client App Calling An Azure Function With AAD

I recently needed to create a client app that used an AAD application to authenticate with an Azure...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 11/07/2018

Kusto Code Hygiene and Performance Tips

Now that you've started authoring your first Kusto queries in Azure Data Explorer, there are a few...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 10/15/2018

Getting Started with the Kusto Query Language (KQL)

Azure Data Explorer is in public preview and their documentation is an excellent place to educate...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 10/11/2018

Ingesting Your First CSV Into Azure Data Explorer

We've been using the Kusto query language internally for quite a while and over that time, and while...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 09/26/2018

Azure Data Explorer Public Preview

There is lots of great stuff flowing out of Microsoft Ignite this week, but my favorite so far is...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 09/24/2018

Encrypt Secrets With A Certificate In Azure Websites

Here's the scenario: you have a secret that needs to be used in your website but you know it's...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 05/09/2017

IP Security in IIS Express

If you're building an Azure website and you want to add IP security, there are quite a few blog...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 10/20/2016

Getting Started with Power Query for Excel

Power Query v1 launched a few months ago. Power Query is part of the Microsoft Power BI suite. If...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 10/22/2013

Ode to Data Explorer

To the tune of The Candy Man by Sammy Davis Jr. Who can talk to SQL, sprinkle with Hadoop Cover it...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 03/15/2013

TFS Work In Progress Shelvesets

By now you all know that you should save your progress often. This batch file will quickly create a...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 11/08/2012

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Desktop Gadgets

Running Windows Server 2008 R2 as a desktop OS does have it’s advantages. As a tester, Hyper V is...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 05/22/2012

Outlook Rules

I live in Microsoft Outlook at work and at home. At home I can just let everything dump into my...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 05/22/2012

Traffic Analysis with Microsoft Data Explorer

For the past couple months, I’ve been running a simple app on my desktop which records the estimated...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 04/03/2012

How to Override a WP7 App Submission

I love writing apps for Windows Phone, and I’ve devoted quite a lot of time to my most popular one,...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 01/14/2012

Bug Tales: WP7 Secondary Live Tiles

In my spare time, I have written quite a few Windows Phone applications. By far the best and most...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 12/08/2011

Removing Errors In Data Explorer

If you step through my previous post about Netflix + Rotten Tomatoes and try to recreate it, you...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 12/07/2011

Using Data Explorer to Combine Netflix and Rotten Tomatoes

I recently reactivated my Netflix subscription after having it on hold for a few months. I had a lot...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 11/18/2011

Do Bicyclists Like Yogurt?

It's so much fun to have material like these videos going out for our product! Here’s another new...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 11/09/2011

New “Data Explorer” Video

Our team has released another video! Hopefully it won’t be too much longer before you can actually...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 11/04/2011

Microsoft Codename “Data Explorer” Announced

I’m happy to announce that the project I’ve been working on is finally public! Technically the...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 10/14/2011

Ambiguous Morse Solver

Decoding Morse Code when there are character delimiters is fairly trivial. When you don’t know where...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 01/06/2011

Play Music After Build

Building our product can take 10-20 minutes depending on how much of the tree you have selected. In...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 06/29/2010

Modules Window in Visual Studio 2010

I went to pull up the modules window in VS2010, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe I did something to...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 06/09/2010

PDC Videos

Here are some videos of the PDC sessions related to my project. The first one, specifically, is...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 11/24/2009

SQL Server Modeling November 09 CTP

The latest CTP from my team is now public on the web! Here are a few of the “M” language updates...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 11/20/2009

MSDN Data DevCenter

Members of my group have been hard at work getting a new MSDN Data DevCenter up and running at...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 11/18/2009

Logs Named By Current DateTime

I have a scheduled task and I’d like to save logs from the output. After some quick batch file work,...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 10/02/2009

Taskbar Pinned Shortcuts Location

Ever wondered where those pinned shortcuts are stored in Win7? %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 10/01/2009

Restrict Your RAM

I recently had a stress test bug assigned to me that I couldn’t repro on my machine with 6GB of...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 09/30/2009

Oslo May 2009 CTP Available

The May 2009 "Oslo" CTP is available on the Oslo Developer Center! Shawn Wildermuth has done a nice...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 05/26/2009

Check Binary Signing

I’ve recently been doing a lot of work around signed and unsigned assemblies. Someone passed along...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 03/05/2009

Why Oslo Is Important

This article by Dan Vanderboom is one of the best pieces of writing I’ve seen to explain why Oslo is...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 01/21/2009

Compressing Primes

A recent program contest at work challenged us to find as many Pythagorean triples as we could that...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 12/30/2008

Oslo on .NET Rocks

Chris Sells is a PM on our team and spent quite a while talking to Carl Franklin on episode #401 of...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 12/12/2008

Hard Drive Penalties

In an introductory programming class, I had a professor who explained CPU cache as sitting in a...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 12/10/2008

Microsoft "Oslo" Resources "Oslo" Developer Center Download the "Oslo" SDK Ask a Question About...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 11/04/2008

Models Remixed

From www.modelsremixed.com...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 10/27/2008

Microsoft "Oslo" Web Page

Now that PDC is in full swing, the Oslo Developer Center has been published. It contains a lot of...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 10/27/2008

Programmatically Changing Your IP Address

A friend needs to change back and forth between a DHCP network and a static IP network. Rather than...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 09/23/2008

Oslo Elevator Pitch

One of the big challenges for me has always been coming up with a short and sweet elevator pitch for...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 09/08/2008

Interview with Ivo Manolov, WPF Test Manager

Michael Hunter and I headed over to building 40 this week to interview Ivo Manolov, the test manager...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 08/13/2008

Oslo at PDC 2008

Are you going to PDC this year? Be sure to stop by some of the Connected Systems Division talks to...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 08/05/2008

We Want Your Crash Dump

I'll admit that prior to coming to Microsoft, I rarely clicked "Send report to Microsoft"...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 07/24/2008

Blogs of Senior Microsoft Testers

I have been meaning to make a post listing out the blogs of some of Microsoft's senior testers, and...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 07/22/2008

Tester Spotlight: Bryan Lipscy

Michael Hunter and I recently recorded an interview with Bryan Lipscy, a tester on the Windows help...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 06/30/2008

I Am The Empire

Thanks to the team over at Microspotting.com for sending me an "I Am The Empire" t-shirt!

Author: Ben Martens Date: 06/25/2008

Elevated Permissions and the Vista SP1 Registry

We recently ran into an interesting issue with our installer which requires elevated permissions to...

Author: Ben Martens Date: 06/18/2008

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