Erwin's Blog

Best Practices Analyzers

On an other blog I found some interesting analysers like:

SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer

The SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) gathers data from Microsoft Windows and SQL Server configuration settings. BPA uses a predefined list of SQL Server 2005 recommendations and best practices to determine if there are potential issues in the database environment.

Best Practice Analyzer for ASP.NET

The Best Practice Analyzer ASP.NET (alpha release) is a tool that scans the configuration of an ASP.NET 2.0 application. The tool can scan against three mainline scenarios (hosted environment, production environment, or development environment) and identify problematic configuration settings in the machine config or web config files associated with your ASP.NET application. This is an alpha release intended to gain feedback on the tool and the configuration rules included with it.

More you can find at this blog post: http://blogs.technet.com/peteh/archive/2008/09/25/best-practices-analyzers.aspx

300+ Visual Studio Tips & Tricks

Recently Sara Ford passed the 300+ mark for her Visual Studio Tips & Tricks section. See gives some usefull tips to work better and faster with Visual Studio 2005/2008. You can find them here:

• Visual Studio 2005 Tip of the Day
• Visual Studio 2008 Tip of the Day

C# vs Ruby vs PHP vs Perl vs Java

1. That Ruby isn't very common language at 9-5 Mon-Fri jobs, so it more used by hobbiest then by professionals.
   
2. Ruby programmers can't stop programming.

Network Monitor 3.2 has released

• Process Tracking: Now you can identify rogue applications sending network data! View all the processes on your machine generating network traffic (process name and PID).  Use the conversation tree to view frames associated with each process.

• Capture engine re-architecture to improve capture rate in high-speed networks. Network Monitor 3.2 drops significantly fewer frames that Network Monitor 3.1.

• Find conversations:  You asked for this. Many of our users found conversation tracking to be difficult to use as the view grew hard to manage, and it was difficult to correlate the frames they were seeing with the conversation nodes in the tree. Now, you can quickly isolate frames in the same network conversation.  Just right-click on a frame and select a conversation to track, and you will see all the frames in that conversation. View TCP streams, HTTP flows etc.

• Extensive parser set:  Parsers for over 300 protocols!  As before, the parsers are fully customizable.

• Better parser management:  By default only a subset of parsers are loaded.  You can load the full parser set by going to Tools>Options>Parser and choose Full vs. Stub implementations.

• CodePlex Ready:  In the upcoming months, we plan to place all our Windows parsers on the Microsoft open-source CodePlex site and allow the community to modify and contribute parsers.  You can find out more information on this here. This version of Network Monitor seamlessly integrates new parser packages.

• Network Monitor API: Create your own applications that capture, parse and analyze network traffic!

• More extensive documentation of the API and NPL.  Access the documentation from Help > NPL and API Documentation.

• IA64 builds.

• PCAP capture file support.

• ContainsBin Plug-in:  Search frames for arbitrary byte sequences or strings.

C# vs Ruby

1. Ruby is used by people that don’t have a personal life and spend the weekend developing stuff?
2. C# is used by people that develop only on their 9-5, Mon-Fri job?