Loren Halvorson's Blog

Tao Klerks has just released a new version (0.9.12) of the Poor Man’s T-SQL Formatter (I blogged about it last week) with several improvements and some more formatting options. He also set up a website so you can use it online http://poorsql.com.  Thanks Tao, it keeps getting better!

If you are working on a project that has a lot of SQL code and wish you could reformat it to make it more readable, I just stumbled on a slick utility that is being developed in C# by Tao Klerks named Poor Man’s T-SQL Formatter.  It can be found here:  http://www.architectshack.com/PoorMansTSqlFormatter.ashx  It’s not finished yet, but has enough functionality to be truly useful.  Tao tells me he is working on refactoring the code to make it more maintainable and adding more formatting options.

One of the web applications I am working on is an ASP.NET MVC 2 site targeting .NET 3.5 SP1 that uses the Microsoft Report Viewer control with local-mode RDLC reports. I initially developed this application using Visual Studio 2008. The client was OK if I started to use Visual Studio 2010, as long as I didn’t require .NET 4.0 just yet. The multi-targeting features of VS2010 were working great. I had started really enjoying VS 2010 and had no intention to go back to 2008. Then I needed to do some report work so I double clicked one of my RDLC files and was surprised to see this message box:

I haven’t posted anything to my blog in a long time, but I wanted to point out that a product I truly love and use often has been updated. Jamie Cansdale has released TestDriven.NET 3.0, still one of my all-time favorite Visual Studio add-ons for low-friction unit testing.  Now it works with Visual Studio 2010, MSTest and tons of new features and refinements.

I bought a new laptop and was loading it with the tools I use every day. When it came to installing one of my favorites, Beyond Compare 2, I thought I'd check the Scooter web site to see if I had the latest version. I was happy to see they now had a version 3 with plenty of new features. I immediately reached for my credit card to buy a license. Folks, this is honestly one of the tools I don't even hesitate paying for...it's that good, and that invaluable. I don't work for them, I'm just a very happy customer.

I finally got around to updating the XmlPreprocess tool with some changes I'm really excited about. For those of you not familiar with XmlPreprocess, it's a command line tool I wrote many years ago that can modify specially annotated XML files much like a code preprocessor. It is useful for deploying XML configuration files to many environments. I've blogged about it in the past as have others, and it's achieved a fair amount of use (albeit hidden below the surface) in my good friend Scott Colestock's Biztalk deployment framework.

A few days into a 3 week vacation with my family I received a call that I wasn't surprised to receive. The company where I had worked for 6 years was downsizing and my position, along with many others in our department, was eliminated. Since downsizing (or worse) was happening across the entire sector, I didn't take it personally. In fact, I took it as a sign that I should try something different. A friend recently said that "getting laid off is one of the best thing that ever happened to him", and I hope to look back and say the same some day.