Archives
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Code Bloooooat
Sam has discovered the wonders of .NET sucking up disk space. Although, I'd be surprised at it already eating up 6GB with just the OS. I've got VS.NET 2002, all of Office 2003, and SQL Server and right now I'm at 5.5gb. If I was to take a guess, it would be a paging file out of control. Right now, w/ 512mb of ram the max size is set to 1.5gb. I'd image that if you had 1gb of RAM, it would swell to 3gb. I mean, it's hard to imaging that you could get 6gb of data from one CD :)
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All the Rage
Stuck at work setting up my class, so I've decided to blow some time with this BlogShares thingy after seeing Scott and Eli joining on. Now I just need to figure out who to invest in.
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impersonation enable="true"
I'm curious to how many people are simply adding ASPNET to their logins in SQL Server instead of using impersonation. Most books I've read simply don't mention it. My 2310 course (Developing an ASP.NET Web App) only faintly mentions it as an option in configuring your app.
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C# vs VB.NET books and the such
Don mentioned the fact that the C# version of the books have been doing much better sales wise than their VB.NET brother (or little sister depending on who you ask). I happen to have been collecting some data on the training worldwide in a side project from our corporate headquarters, www.newhorizons.com. Now based solely on the dates on the website as of two weeks ago, here's the breakdown in scheduling of the classes. I should mention that I don't speak for New Horizons or even my individual center. I just went to their website and grabbed data. Break it down:
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Essential ASP.NET
With Sam raving about Fritz Onion's Essential ASP.NET book, I decided to pick a copy up myself. Heck, it meets Phil's Theory of Book Buying #3: "Buy anything with Ted Pattison's name on it." Plus, I'm teaching an ASP.NET class next week and maybe a bit of Fritz's brilliance will rub off on me :)
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Google & .NET
That's true as long as you don't actually use MSDN to do your searching. Compare the hits from:
Searching MSDN for ADO.NET
Searching Google for ADO.NET (limited to Microsoft.com) -
Double Whammy
Argh. The dreaded double whammy. Not only is my team out, but my bracket is more hosed than normal. I've did much better in past years when the Cards haven't been in the Tourney.
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Ok, But That's the Last Straw
Argh. If someone at Microsoft happens to read this, here in Louisville (the 16th-largest US city) we do have Computers and even people using VS.NET. And I could use a new t-shirt :)
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Hey Jay Bilas, how's your Bracket?
Greg 'Big Daddy G-Man' Robinson is in the lead in the prestigous .NET NCAA Tournament challange after a couple of serious scares from Maryland and Wake. Not only that, he's doing better than 98.4% of the country.
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Mono
Mitch Rupp pointed towards an article on Internet Weekly about the progress of Mono. Some quotes I found interesting:
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C - A - R - D - S Go Cards Go!
Instead of cluttering up this place with even more ramblings from myself about the games, I've brought back my Radio Blog with running thought from the NCAA games.
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Day One
Some people go overboard decorating their house for christmas, some people create full out haunted houses for a halloween, and I have March Madness. From the Daily Quickie:
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Micro vs Macro Optimizations
Scott and Victor had a little discussion about getting the value inside the loop vs outside the loop. Now common sense would dictate to me that outside the loop would of course be faster. So, for my own amusement I threw together a little test. I simply ran their code and tried to figure out which one was faster. Going through a 12 item array, declaring with the loop (i < array.Length) actually was 2 seconds faster than getting it outside the loop. Of course, to get a 2 second difference I had to run each chunk of code 500,000,000 times. The difference may have simply have been the overhead of declaring a variable to store the length. I'm not too sure, I didn't dig into the IL.
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Sudelbücher
A little bit of an internation feel of things with Ralf Westphal's posts. He's got a pretty cool word in his title "Sudelbücher." It's like a journal I guess, but a little more informal. Found this definition from google: "sort of an informal notebook where you keep your trip expenses, that sort of thing, collections of thoughts, random, flashes, worked sentences."
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Unchecked Buffer
Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-007
Unchecked Buffer In Windows Component Could Cause Web Server Compromise (815021) -
ASPNET
I was playing around with some code that we use in one of my Microsoft courses. Not a complex example, and it assumes you've granted privledges to the ASPNET account datareader for Northwind. No biggie I guess (this is actually quite common in courses that don't focus on ASP.NET. Getting into identity might be considered overkill for many of these classes). Well, this is all fine and dandy unless you are running 2003. I get a big ol' Login failed for user 'NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE' error message thrown at me. Bastards!
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SQL Server System Table Map
Pretty old stuff, but my partners in crime is teach SQL Server Admin this week, and it reminded me that I wanted to post a link to the Sql Server System Table Map. It's in chm format, so it's pretty easy to navigate with pretty pictures of all the tables and how they are related. Granted, you should always use the system procedures or information_schema_views, but sometimes you just need to go gonzo and dig into those system tables.
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InfoPath, No Cure for Cancer. Well...
A lot of talk about InfoPath. Just got my beast of an Office 2003 beta kit in the mail, so I've been playing around with it. I wouldn't say I've drank the kool-aid, but I definitely have sipped it. Not my favorite flavor, but I definitely see where others might enjoy it.
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Can You Feel It?
Ok, I went ahead and created a group on ESPN's tournament challenge. If you don't have a username/password, well, you'll need to signup. I've never recieve mail from them in the three years I've done this (besides they "hey dummy, fill this out" type stuff I suppose). After that, click on the second link below and join the group. It's that simple! Pass this along to whoever you want, as long as they don't think of those singing Jamacan's when you say CLR. I'll post reminders until Thursday. In an act of brilliance, I asked for vacation days in November for Thursday and Friday. MWwwwwwwwahahahaha.
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Tourney Time
I'm going to put together a ESPN.com Tournament Coverage thingy later tonight. Any .NETer is invited of course, not just people with blogs here. I know we got a couple guys from Cinci, Scott's a cameron crazy, Jason Bock went to Marquette, and it should be a little fun with some competition.
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Jason Bock
Stumbled upon Jason Bock's weblog today via my traceback / postback chumpy. Jason wrote the excellent CIL Programming "Under the Hood of .NET". This book is from APress, which while I feel they might need to get on the ball updating some of my favorite beta 2 books, still have perhaps one of the most talented group of authors working for them. One Apress title I'm looking forward to is .NET Game Programming with DirectX. Game programming isn't something I ever got to big into, and maybe this will help me push myself towards that.
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WROX Press
Word on the streets is that Wrox is closing their doors. Wrox has had some good authors and good books, but unfortunately they are few and far between. I got to the point where I wouldn't even glipse at a Wrox press book unless someone specificaly pointed me to it, or I knew THE author. Great books from Wrox: Beginning Visual Basic 6 and Professional SQL Server 2000 (and the 7.0 book btw).
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It's a System!
Try the Microsoft Office System: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/orderbeta.asp
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VMWare 4.0 beta
I was curious to see how VMWare 4.0 works (in particular the Windows 2003 Server RC2 installs went), so I signed up and downloaded the beta. Now, since this is a beta I naturally didn't want to hose my home machine, so I instinctively fired up VMWare to create a virtual machine to test VMware on. I think I just went cross-eyed.
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For what it's worth
A lot of interest amongst the DotNetBloggers about InfoPath, so perhaps some will find this helpful: http://microsoft.order-5.com/officeeval/
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Hooray for School!
Finally got into the 70-300 exam after a week of teaching SQL. Pretty interesting exam. The case studies weren't your typical "you are developing an n-tier accounting system..." types stuff. A little new app development, extending an app, and replacing AS/400. Three case studies and I was out. I felt pretty good about most of my answers. Had one question about ORM that I had to reach into the cellars of my brain from the MSDN video on it. Overall, I haven't the foggiest of ideas on how to tell someone to prepare for that exam besides "work with a lot of .NET."
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Windows Server 2003 Pricing
Microsoft has announced pricing for their different flavors of Windows Server 2003. Most interesting is that the web server edition is coming in at $399. Here's a table showing how the different editions differ.
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Ted Neward, you are my ambassador of Kwan.
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Building Communities with Software
Here's a sanitized version of Joel's Building Communities with Software article mentioned previously. You can never go wrong with a StrongBad reference either. They say smart people use StrongBad reference's on their blogs. And choose green.
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identical two-phase commit in a mental state of complete tedium
On the Path to XML Hell [via Scripting.com]. Hey, I feel this guy's pain. I'm teaching courses 1013 (Mastering VB6) and 1017 (Mastering Inder-freakin'-dev 6) in the next few months. At which point I will be faced with chapters talking about how DHTML Scriptlets are the solution to everything, how COM will last forever and ADO is the most usefull technology for accessing databases.
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Notify Me Checkbox
Not sure how many people subscribe to Joel on Software and got his "Building Communities with Software" e-mail, but it is an interesting read. Drop me a line if you want a copy - Joel asks that nobody reprint the article on their site and has choosen not to make some of the info public. Anyways, he mentions the fact that the "notify when somebody replies to me" is not implemented because it kills a site because people will post something, leave the site and never come back. "The end." This is somewhat I feel about RSS. While having a news aggregator is nice and makes things easier to read more "stuff," you never get a feel of community and it's harder to get a feel for the poster. For a long time I was reading blogs without an aggregator. I got to know blogs not just on their content, but also on the links they provide, what it looked like, what software they were running and so on.
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NULL
I'm working on a few sprocs for our schedule and I'm about to throw myself head first through the window. Some of the courses in our schedule do not have a "part_id" to identify them. Basically, they are courses that our corporate HQ doesn't consider official, so I have no outlines, books, exercise files, etc for these courses. No problem. In those cases, it looks like they've used NULL to indicate the lack of a part_id. Sometimes, they've taken that to the extreme. Some records have a NULL value, others have the text "NULL." Argh.
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Bin Drinkin
Roy's post on RSS got me thinkin'. Well not thinkin, more got me in the mood to post something. I don't think RSS is the wave of the future, I don't think bloggers should be considered in the same realm as professional journalism (no matter how unprofessional other paper journalist may be). I've had a "blog" since freakin' 1996. Long enough that I remember adding tables and background images to it because I thought they were cool. I don't think my opinion matters at all, and I don't bitch everytime an article gets posted about online coverage of an event and the "blog community" doesn't get included in the "media" that covered it. I take weblogs as they are: A technology to easyily get people talking. It's like XML Web Services. It is no different than what I did in 1995 to make sure I could detect client side when an update was available to my machine. But a "little" more standard than my custom format was.