February 2004 - Posts
Woudln't it be great if
Orkut and
Plaxo teamed up, so my Orkut friends automagically showed up in my Outlook contacts? That would be frickin swell. Would save me a buttload of time updating my Outlook contacts from my Orkut profile.
Want to create a stored procedure that searches for specific, but optional, values? I had to do it today for a web project I'm working on (I hate not being able to talk about projects I'm working on) and Terry Denham, the SQL Guru without a blog, came to my rescue yet again. Because the WHERE clause has secluded OR statements buttressed by a "trueism" (Terry's term) of 1 = 1 (does anyone know of a case where one DOESN'T equal one?), the statement will always execute, even if you don't pass anything in. Pretty cool, huh? Thanks Terry! Saved my butt again.
CREATE PROCEDURE TestProc
(
@Param1 varchar(50) = NULL,
@Param2 varchar(50) = NULL,
@Param3 varchar(50) = NULL
)
AS
SELECT
*
FROM
TestTable
WHERE
((@Param1 IS NULL) OR (col1 = @Param1)) AND
((@Param2 IS NULL) OR (col2 = @Param2)) AND
((@Param3 IS NULL) OR (col3 = @Param3))
Results in:
exec TestProc
exec TestProc I
exec TestProc I, Love
exec TestProc I, Love, SPROCs
UPDATE: The procedure above was updated to correct a logical flaw in Terry's example.You cannot use a “trueism” because you will always get back all rows no matter what parameters you pass in.While not as performant as Dynamic SQL (blah blah blah) it does the trick in situations like mine where direct table operations are not allowed for security reasons.
I had no idea that the DEMO conference was here in Phoenix. GRRR. If anyone is still around, e-mail me at robert@interscapeusa.com. Lets go grab a beer or something.
I just found out that both of Interscape's products are listed in the asp.netPRO Magazine Reader's Choice Awards. I wanted to take a minute and point out the other sites/components that are available for you to vote on:
kbAlertz.com - Community Resource (Survey Page 2)
Run by Scott Cate, AZDNUG leader
myKB.com - Content Management System (Survey Page 3)
Also run by Scott Cate
aspNet Email - Email Control (Survey Page 3)
Built by Dave Wanta, E-mail Master
ScrollingGrid - Grid Components (Survey Page 3)
Built by Andy Smith of Interscape Technologies
ASPnetMenu - Navigation Control (Survey Page 4)
Built by Miljan Braticevic, Cyberakt
Peter's Polling Package - Polling Tool (Survey Page 4)
Built by Peter Blum - Validation Guru
GenX.NET - Utility (Survey Page 5)
Built by Yours Truly
Voting ends on March 3rd, and winners will be announced in the June 2004 issue of aspnetPRO Magazine. What are you waiting for.... go vote!
Over the past few months, I let PatchDayReview.com get way too far behind. It took me nearly 7 hours to update, but the site is now current with all known security updates through this Tuesday. One change of note is that I am no longer allowing comments on bulletins themselves. If you want to comment on a specific patch, there is a link to that bulletin's forum on the PatchDayReview Forums. If you'd like to discuss patches, please do it there. At any rate, sorry to kill your aggregators, but most of you subscribe to Scoble, so you're used to it by now.
Note to Microsoft Downloads Staff: Thanks for making my life more difficult in getting the direct download links. Instead of clicking the hyperlink and selecting “Properties”, you turned the link into a button, and I know have to track it down in the HTML source to find the direct link. Way to take care of the people that are helping you deal with security.
It's been awful quiet on my blogs lately, so I thought I'd take a few minutes to talk about what I've been working on this month.
Nihkil let the cat out of the bag a tad early. Yes, I am working on putting a community together specifically for server controls. It's going to be a lot more than just blogs, and most of it will run on an enhanced version of .Text. We're hoping to launch at the end of the month, but no promises. A lot of things have to be in place before we can make it live. I'll be talking about this more in a few weeks.
LonghornBlogs.com is going to be getting an upgrade soon. Along with .Text 0.96, which will allow for searching the blog system, we're going to start pulling in feeds from other Longhorn-related blogs. I've been waiting for this for a long time, and Andy starts working on the software to make it happen this evening. I have yet to decide whether or not we'll make this program available to the community, or keep it as an Interscape-community-only thing. We'll see. I'm told we'll also have the ability to have global categories, which will allow us to further expand the system in exciting ways.
Speaking of Andy, he just wrapped up development on ScrollingGrid 2.0. We're now entering a beta phase, in which I'll be testing its capabilities in a number of different apps that I have, and then sending it out to a small number of developers to test. We should be finished with the beta by the time the new site rolls out at the end of the month. The major feature of this version is that we have added some killer new client-side code that makes the columns align every time, in most browsers (IE4 - Firefox 0.8), without specificly specifying each column's width. We've also polished up the properties a bit, and made them more intuitive. Unfortunately, this will break pages for our existing customers, so I'm working on upgrading the User's Guide to walk our customers through the upgrade process. Also, this version fixes a nasty bug that broke ScrollingGrid's rendering when you tried to add paging of any kind. You can now page and scroll very effectively.
With Version 2, I really feel that ScrollingGrid accomplishes everything that I want it to. I couldn't really justify charging a whole lot before, because we were doing a lot of experimenting with our first server control release. Now, I'm really comfortable with it, and I think it will do everything that customers expect. Because of this, we're going to be adjusting ScrollingGrid's pricing model, adding new licensing levels with enhanced support options. The good news is that all existing customers will get a free upgrade to ScrollingGrid 2.0. So if you don't want to pay more for 2.0, you should head on over to our store and pick up a copy today. The next 2 weeks will be the last time that ScrollingGrid prices will be this low.
On the DeadBolt.NET front, thanks to Jamie Cansdale and his updated ManagedAddins Framework, we now have a version that works with Visual Studio .NET 2002, and we will be putting that online after it has gone through some testing, and upgrades to the User's Guide. This will be the last version in the 1.0 line, and the last version that will be free. The next version will introduce some really cool new features and services, but the basic functionality (signing an assembly) will always be free.
That's about it for me. I talk more about the problems we've been encountering on the business side in my Corporate Blog. If you're interested, check it out.
Mike Kolitz says that MS should
take the 16-bit subsystems out of Longhorn. I agree completely.
Chris Anderson had a different opinion at PDC about this, but I still don't agree with his position. Microsoft needs to not enable the crap of yesterday in the OS of tomorrow. Break stuff if you have to. Put VPC in Longhorn and disable it by default. I can understand leaving the 32-bit native stuff in there, but the 16-bit stuff too? Come on. Move forward, and don't look back.
Companies are advising customers to hack their registry in order to circumvent the latest IE patch. Head on over to PatchDayReview.com to get my opinion of this idea, and what you should do if it is suggested to you.
I'm surprised this idea hasn't caught on sooner. Sewers are a natural place to run infrastructure. Sure, installing the cables would be kinda shitty (pun intended), but isn't that why a cabling installer's natural tendancy is to run cables through ventilation shafts? Infrastructure costs would plummet, and our streets wouldn't have to be dug up so much.
Out of common courtesy to everyone else, will people PLEASE check how their post renders on the home page directly after posting? Someone thought put a scrollable area in their title. Now. I'm a big fan of those, believe me, but the whole rest of the site is unreadable now.
Remember, the title field does not strip out HTML, so you have to use < and >, or prefix it with the <XMP> tag. I'm going to check the source control and see if I can fix that right now, so it's not ever a problem again.
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