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These blog entries are written by industry experts and leaders. We consider this content to be a good read for any software developer or web technologist.
April 2006 - Posts
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While I wouldn't label myself a Luddite (seeing as I'm a software developer by trade!), I am pretty far from the cutting edge. I recently joined this century, however, by upgrading my work environment to include dual monitors, a move I've been meaning to do over the past several years but have never gotten around to it for a variety of reasons. I've heard/read of the benefits[1][2][3], and my wife's been telling me how proficient she is with her dual monitor setup at work..... I guess it's a mix of laziness and cheapness that keeps me fairly wed to the status quo. I think I'd be a good Buddhist, since my desire for material items and “stuff” is pretty much nil.
Anywho, after enough years of kicking around the idea I decided this past weekend to take the plunge and go dual monitor. We went to Frys to see about getting another video card (since mine only has a single output) and matching monitor. Sadly, they weren't selling the monitor I had purchased from the store a year or two ago (a Sharp LCD 17” LL-172C-B), but I did pick up the same video card (except a PCI one, versus the original AGP one), a cheap-o GeForce 4000 MX, about $50.
Sadly, Sharp doesn't appear to be making the same monitor I had, but I found a site where I could buy a refurbished one for about half of what a new one would cost. I'm always a bit concerned when buying used/refurbished electronic equipment, but this monitor looks and behaves brand new. Setting up the dual monitors is fairly easy (I'm using Windows 2003). The only part that wasn't straightforward was in installing the video card. Once I installed it, the BIOS thought that the PCI card was the main video output, but Windows thought the AGP card was the video output. What happened was that the monitor plugged into the AGP slot wouldn't show anything and the one in the PCI slot would show the startup screen when turning the computer on, but would go blank once Windows had loaded. The fix was to go into the BIOS editor and set the primary display channel from PCI back to AGP.
And now I have two monitors! I've just been using this setup for a couple of days. I can't say how much of a real productivity boost there is, though. It's nice to have the two monitors, don't get me wrong, but I'm just not sure if, for what I do, two is any quicker than one. The only thing that seems to be a bit quicker is debugging, since I can have VS.NET on one screen and a browser in the other, which helps with interacting with the page/stepping through lines of code in the debugger.
Pardon the gunk on the keyboard, I need to clean that off one of these days.
Right now I'm trying out UltraMon, which adds a lot of nice features for dual monitor support, such as extending the task bar, providing buttons in the Windows title bar to quickly stretch windows across screens or move it from one screen to another, and so on.
Now that I've got two monitors, I'm wondering if it's worth it to go for three...... :-)
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Registration for the 2006 Atlanta Code Camp (to be held on May 13) is now open. We're in a larger facility this year, but its still going to "sell out" (it is free though), so don't wait.
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Programming SQL Server 2005, by Bill Hamilton, is an excellent book to help developers experienced with MS SQL 2000 to get up to speed on what's new in 2005. First, it is focused squarely towards developers, which is a great thing for developers -- no more having to wade through all of the DBA-oriented features. Next, it is only about the new features, which again is a good thing for most of us -- no need to skip the usual chapters on the basics of MS SQL and T-SQL. Finally, it is short and concise, with good practicle examples, which is good again -- no massive repeat of the documentation or silly hello world examples. There is good coverage of the new T-SQL syntax, of the CLR integration, of all things XML, of SMO which replaces DMO, and of SSIS which replaces DTS. There are also intros to all other features, like Web Services, WMI, Reporting, Server Agent, Service Broker, Notification, Replication, Analysis, and SQL Mobile. This content level feels about right for a concise book on what's new -- you may need more on some features, but there are entire books on some of these. Note that the book claims to be for all levels of developers, but its clearly only appropriate for those with SQL 2000 experience since its just what's new. Finally, as with every other book I've seen, there is no attempt to give you any advice on what you should avoid and why -- something that I would like to see. For instance, everyone likes to talk about CLR integration, but most will misuse this, and most DBAs will never allow you to use SQL Web Services. But in general, if you are an experienced MS SQL 2000 developer that wants to quickly get up to speed on SQL 2005, then this will be an excellent book for you.
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While playing around with Sqlite I downloaded about 5 different free “explorers” and a couple different admin tools, then I found SQLite Administrator which completely rocks. Its still in beta but it works like a champ, you can work with tables, write SQL, import/export, and much more. Definitely the best I found.
(More on SQLite soon)
-James ![]()
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I can't say that I've ever used a nested class myself, but I recently had a problem posted to my forums that involved a nested class and my ORMapper. I tested it myself and concluded that it was a bug due to my never having worrying about it before. Well it wasn't easy to find the solution, but I'm happy to report that there was no bug at all -- you just have to know the trick that .NET expects when using nested classes with reflection. It turns out that you should use a plus sign (+) instead of a dot (.) when referring to the nested class in a type name that you are going to reflect on -- so something like this: "Name.Space.Main+Nested". Its even in the MSDN docs here, although its not in other parts of the MSDN docs that I was originally looking for it at, like here. Anyhow, I assume this information will be useful to anyone using reflection with nested classes, and it probably applies to other O/R Mappers also, so it seemed worthy of posting on this blog.
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I am thinking about smart client architecture and trying to decide what the best local data store would be, either VistaDB or Sqlite. I thought about SQL Server 2005 Express, but the install requirements put it at a severe disadvantage to either of these super light databases.
Anyone out there have any experience with either of these databases? What about using NHibernate with them? I am leaning towards sqlite, especially after I looked at these benchmarks and the fact that there is already a nhibernate dialect for sqlite. (not to mention it’s free, open source, and has a very high space limitation)
-James Reader Comment - Brenton House says,
"What about Sql Server Everywhere Edition? I don't think it's out yet,
but it probably is going to ship with SQL Server 2005 SP1. It doesn't
require any kind of an install.
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/letter.mspx
http://pluralsight.com/blogs/jimw/archive/2006/04/06/21167.aspx" Reader Comment - Jeff Lewis says,
I'm using sqllite on an Windows Mobile smart client app and it rocks.
All of the other db's I tried were too slow in this low memory
environment, but with sqllite, I was able to get reasonable query times
for the very large db that the app uses. Reader Comment - Catherine Devlin says,
"
I've never used VistaDB, but I really love SQLite. It's just so ridiculously incredibly easy...
It's
a problem if you want multiple processes to make updates at once,
however, because it does lock the entire file for update.
Also,
I've seen the query performance become disappointing when the file size
grows beyond a couple GB. You need a lot of data to get it there,
though, because it's very low-fat (unlike, say, Oracle, which wants
about a GB before you add a single row of your own data)."
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My favorite code snippet repository, CodeKeep, now has some cool site badges you can add to your site that link to the snippets you have stored there. You can see mine over on the right of this blog.
-James ![]()
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I'm using the new ASP.NET v2.0 Login control and it works great for me and most other users in both IE and FireFox, but there seems to be a small number of users that cannot get it to work in IE on at least some computers. I'll be the first to admit that maybe its not the Login control at all, since maybe its some other esoteric code of my own or some setting I've chosen, and in fact I have created a very bare-bones test with the Login control that seems to prove it is not the issue for these users. So my question, since I haven't figured it out yet, nor do I see anything like this in the forums or the MSDN Feedback Center (Ladybug), is if anyone else has encountered anything like this, and if so then how were you able to resolve it? Again it works great for me in IE, so I can't duplicate the problem, and it works great for most other IE users, but there are a few IE users that are unable to login (or at least their credentials are lost immediately) and they don't report anything odd in their browser settings.
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I realized the other day I have been slacking on these posts, mainly because I haven’t been reading as much as usual due to my current project and the book I am pretty exhausted by the time I hit the bed. Here is what I have gotten through over the last couple months:
Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs
Geek Love – Katherine Dunn
Ok, so Naked Lunch is one of the stranger books I have ever read. I am not really sure what to make of it. It’s both brilliant and insane, and I have to admit I didn’t understand it all. This edition was interesting because it also includes some of the transcript from the indecency trial for the book, including testimony from Ginsberg and Norman Mailer… pretty interesting stuff.
I have had Geek Love sitting on my shelf for some time, and its not about computer geeks meeting on myspace or something… its about carnival folk. (Geeks being the guys/gals who bite the heads off chickens) It was an awesome book, not only a good story but also tackling the topic of our appearances and how they affect our lives. Very good stuff. (Thanks to Brendan for the recommendation)
-James ![]()
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