The biggest adjustment with having a kid is just the sheer amount of time they take up. And I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. Especially after they start walking and needing constant supervision. I regularly find myself recalling pre-child times and wondering just what the hell I did with all my time. The following tips are just a few things that I’ve learned throughout the last year and a bit, that are mostly common sense. I thought I’d share them anyway. Some of you may relate, some may find inspiration, some may be able to add more!

Video games are based on rules. To quote my man Morpheus, “what you must learn is that these rules are no different than the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken.” The more that a game attempts to give you, the more variables are introduced, and the greater the scope for bugs and other general weirdness.

For several years now I’ve considered creating a gaming blog. I’ve toyed with the idea of adding gaming content over on picnicerror.

Microsoft’s Build conference for 2016 took place a couple of weeks ago, and true to form, there were a number of killer announcements and reveals for a number of services, tools, and frameworks, many of which are available today. Not one to ever really post something when it’s actually relevant, here are a few of the things that jumped out at me from the event.

Yet again I’ve let things slide and haven’t posted in a while.

A couple of months ago, Microsoft’s new-look Power BI Preview rolled out globally. Ditching the Office 365/Sharepoint Online requirement, the new Power BI is a streamlined, simplified version of the product that attempts to lose some of the bloat and give users a focussed, easy-to-use, self-service BI platform.

So has it worked?

2014 has been a very quiet year on picnicerror.net. Since moving job in April, things have been rather hectic, which has meant I’ve not had much time to post, despite having lots of good ideas for content.

As part of Microsoft’s push to include business users in the Business Intelligence space, the addition of Data Quality Services to SQL Server’s feature set opened up the ETL process to the people who, arguably, know the data best. Integration with SSIS was a great move, meaning that this user control extends to automated processes, further closing the gap between data and the business.

However, like most new components, Data Quality Services has some teething problems, and these can be quite hard to find when debugging your SSIS packages. Here’s a quick tip that should help solve some of those tricky to find DQS issues.