I was ahead of my time? (SQL FileTables)
A long time ago in a land far away (ok, 40 minutes west and 20 years ago but lets not quibble over the details) I started playing with Microsoft Access. I loved I (Yes. I said I loved Access. It was the 90’s. Things were different then. We shall never speak of this again. Thank you.). In fact, I over-loved it. I shoved everything into it. Application Data, Logging, Security and even Files. Yes, I said files. I know, I...
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Stop! Hammer time…
For lovers of hyperbolic technology predictions, 2011 was a banner year. Based on media coverage one would assume that right now I’m sitting in front of my 3D TV while I write this blog on my phone. Meanwhile my ceiling is checking the weather while my refrigerator is busy posting to Google+ that I’m low on coconut water.
My favorite of 2011 was the predicted death of the PC. What makes this one so interesting is that people were eager to...
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Tablet PC Developer Forums
I'm going to take Julia's advice and start reading/posting more to the www.tabletpcdeveloper.com forums.
There is one thing about those forums that drive me nuts (and a big reason why no one uses them), you cannot search them. And by that I mean, the search always returns nothing. At least I assume when I search for “ink” I would get something (right now I get nothing)....
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Office 2010 Helps Me Out
I stink at proof reading. I miss a slew of grammatical and spelling errors. Okay, slew is an understatement.
When I started working heavily with speech technology a few years ago I discovered something interesting. If I used text-to-speech to read what I wrote I caught all the errors. My completely unprofessional diagnosis - my brain is filtering the data stream from my eyes but not my ears. I immediately started using this new trick to improve my proof reading.
The one...
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SQL Denali Makes Even Fast Look Slow
I’ve seen a lot of performance testing over the years, every so often I’m even impressed a bit by the results. Here is one however that will melt the mind of anyone working against large SQL databases: SQL Denali + 1.4 billion with a b rows = 455x increase from 2008 R2. No, I didn’t fat finger an extra 5 there. It was that big.
How? By using a new feature called a Column Store Index (aka Column Indexing). For those...
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Welcome! Support group meets Wednesdays at the Library...
Popularity has its downsides.
My favorite bit is "Independent Mac security experts believe there is enough security built into the OS X operating system to protect users, given the current level of risk."
This raises a question for me. If there is no need to protect OS X because of its built in security, why would there be a need for "Independent Mac Security Experts" in the first place?...
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Blue Badge
I've been very lucky in my career so far. I've had the pleasure of working on some amazing software with many brilliant people over the years. And starting in two weeks, I'll be continuing that trend.
Starting at the end of the month, I'll be joining Microsoft. The official title is "Senior ISV Architect Evangelist" but, as with most titles, it doesn't really tell you much. Basically I'll be helping ISVs leverage the Microsoft stack. I'm excited because it means I'll...
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Porting to MySpace using Silverlight
I was looking for a simple way to bring an existing web application to MySpace. I wanted to be able to place this app on a Profile page so that visitors could interact with it (similar to the Music and Video players provided by MySpace). My initial thought was to simply use an IFRAME that displayed my application. Unfortunately this turned out to be impossible as MySpace doesn’t allow IFRAMEs to be placed on Profile or Home surfaces.
So...
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Implementing InstanceDependencyProperty
If you were looking to the UCMA 3.0 documentation for information on how to use InstanceDependencyProperty, don’t. Its incomplete and what is there is incorrect.
In an effort to implement my custom activities in the same way as Microsoft, I wanted to ensure that property values didn’t get destroyed when you moved on to the next activity in your workflow. This is vital if you plan on returning values from a Workflow Activity for another Activity to make use of. For...
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Building a New Record Audio Activity
One of the key activities missing from UCMA that we used in Speech Sever 2007 is the Record Audio Activity. This was one of my “go to” tools in the Speech Server arsenal, so I’ve been hurting without. So to eliminate my pain, and hopefully some other’s, I’ve started building a replacement. While what I’ve built so far isn’t nearly feature-complete, it will hopefully provide a suitable starting point for those looking to simply record some audio. Trust me, starting...
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