Jose R. Guay Paz : Data

The ASP.NET Capsule #17: Book Recommendations from Packt Publishing with Sample Chapters

Jose Rolando Guay Paz — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:36:00 GMT

Here are some book recommendations from Packt Publishing with a sample chapter.

Learning jQuery 1.3

Sample Chapter
Chapter 4: Effects

Entity Framework Tutorial

Sample Chapter
Chapter 2: Getting Started

ASP.NET 3.5 Application Architecture and Design

Sample Chapter
Chapter 5: Model View Controller

ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials

Sample Chapter
Chapter 4: Working with the DataList Controller

ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking

Sample Chapter
Chapter 5: Friends

DotNetNuke Skinning Tutorial

Sample Chapter
Chapter 2: Creating Your First Skin

Enjoy!

News: System.Data.OracleClient update

Jose Rolando Guay Paz — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:56:00 GMT

Microsoft has made a huge announcement regarding the OracleClient library in ADO.NET. Himanshu Vasishth, Program Manager for ADO.NET OracleClient made the following information available in the ADO.NET Team Blog yesterday:

As a part of formulating our long term strategy for ADO.NET, we have had several discussions with number of our customers, internal and external partners, and MVPs to better align our development efforts to ensure we are delivering the right technologies according to our customers’ highest priority needs. One of the key intent of these discussions and the associated research was to understand the needs and requirements of customers who develop applications with Oracle using “System.Data.OracleClient” (OracleClient). OracleClient is the ADO.NET provider for Oracle developed by Microsoft and ships as a part of the .NET Framework.

We learned that a significantly large portion of customers use our partners’ ADO.NET providers for Oracle; with regularly updated support for Oracle releases and new features. In addition, many of the third party providers are able to consistently provide the same level of quality and support that customers have come to expect from Microsoft. This is strong testament of our partners support for our technologies and the strength of our partner ecosystem. It is our assessment that even if we made significant investments in ADO.Net OracleClient to bring it at parity with our partners based providers, customers would not have a compelling reason to switch to ADO.Net OracleClient.

The Decision

After carefully considering all the options and talking to our customers, partners, and MVPs it was decided to deprecate OracleClient as a part of our ADO.NET roadmap.

Read the full story here.

Free Ebook: Mastering SQL Server 2005 Profiler

Jose Rolando Guay Paz — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:04:00 GMT

Hi all.

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Checkout my video on SQL Server 2008 Table-Valued Parameters

Jose Rolando Guay Paz — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:19:48 GMT

Hi all.

Checkout my latest video in the SQL Server 2008 series, about Table-Valued Parameters.

Hope you like it.

Enjoy.

Checkout my video on SQL Server 2008 New Data Types

Jose Rolando Guay Paz — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:46:45 GMT

Hi all.

You can check my video on SQL Server 2008 new data types. I’ll be posting some more videos soon.

Thanks for watching.

Enjoy.

Ensure Proper Closure & Disposal Of A DataReader

Jose Rolando Guay Paz — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:53:00 GMT

Most of the time, we create programs that use DataReaders (weather they are on ASP.NET or Winforms). They're fast, easy to use but sometimes, they fill out our connections pool and withour proper care, they can cause problems to our users.

There are some blog posts around this issue and many questions in the forums, so I'll try to make it as simple as possible so you'll find it attractive to use, because in the end, there is no magic here, just a nice tip.

The solution: Use the DataReader within the scope of a using clause. How? Take a look at this sample:

Regular Programming
In general, programmers tend to use DataReaders like this:

SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection("connection string");
SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("SELECT * FROM SomeTable", connection);
SqlDataReader reader = cmd.ExecuteReader();
if (reader != null)
{
      while (reader.Read())
      {
              //do something
      }
}
reader.Close();
reader.Dispose();

While this would work and do excatly what you need it to do, it does not ensure that the reader will be actualy closed and disposed. Why? it's by design. DataReaders will be kept open until they got all the data from the source and even then, they depend on the command object that should be opened with the CommandBehavior.CloseConnection parameter.

So, anyway. Here is my proposed solution to overcome this problems.

using (SqlDataReader reader = cmd.ExecuteReader())
{
       if (reader != null)
       {
              while (reader.Read())
              {
                        //do something
              }
              reader.Close();
              reader.Dispose();
       }
}

Why this works better? Because the DataReader lives only within the scope of the using clause. Once the flow leaves the using clause the datareader is forced to deallocate from memory thus closing/disposing it properly.

Hope this will help you get the most of DataReaders because, yes, they are the FASTEST way to get data from any datasource.

Enjoy!!