Archive for June, 2004

SQL Server Express Link

Tuesday, June 29th, 2004

Wow.  Here’s a real link on how to use SQL Server Express with Visual Studio.  The integration is far better than I expected.   I’m impressed.   My biggest complain with MSDE was related to deployment, and they’ve nailed it.  Good work guys.  

SQL Express and Visual C# Express

Tuesday, June 29th, 2004

I want to play with the CLR integration in SQL Express.  I installed Visual C# Express, but I couldn’t figure out how to connect to a database – creating a database didn’t work, the command-line tools didn’t work…   So I ended up downloading the full package of SQL Express and installing it, after installing the […]

Canada

Sunday, June 27th, 2004

Canada holds national federal elections and the results don’t even warrant a mention on the CNN front page.   

Windows and Virtual Memory Usage

Thursday, June 17th, 2004

I’ve always felt that virtual memory in Windows could be done better, and lately I’ve been noticing it more than usual. When you do something that uses a lot of memory (like play a game, compile a large program, etc), it seems that Windows doesn’t do a very good job of figuring out what to […]

A Refactoring Nit

Monday, June 14th, 2004

Here’s a ‘before’ and ‘after’ example from the book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Safari link). double basePrice = _quantity * _itemPrice; if (basePrice > 1000) return basePrice * 0.95; else return basePrice * 0.98; if (basePrice() > 1000) return basePrice() * 0.95; else return basePrice() * 0.98; … double basePrice() { return […]

First Avalon 3D Demo

Wednesday, June 9th, 2004

http://blogs.msdn.com/danlehen/archive/2004/06/01/146259.aspx It’s an Avalon version of the Boing demo from the Amiga days.  Very cool.  

Language trends

Wednesday, June 9th, 2004

A quote from Better Living through Software:  “And if your code doesn’t manipulate data (as relational or XML), then what does it do?!?” I was thinking about this this morning, in the context of the growing number of people saying “everyone works with relational data, yet languages don’t have relational database support built in”.  Here’s […]

Speaking of databases…

Wednesday, June 9th, 2004

While I’m on the topic, here’s a little rantlet. I can understand the reasons for moving processing closer to the data by using stored procedures.  It makes sense.  But, it’s a pain.  It ties me to a particular database.  ODBC would let me switch databases at will (it defines a particular SQL grammar that every […]

Moving SQL Server databases

Tuesday, June 8th, 2004

I spent a lot of last night and this morning moving an SQL Server database from one computer to another.  This is much more complex than it needs to be. I’m using Rainbow as a portal engine, and I’m using the yetanotherforum.net forum engine and a few other pieces of software.  I set up SQL […]

Software Revenue: Focus on revenue from end users leads to better software

Sunday, June 6th, 2004

There was an item posted somewhere recently that argued that when a company focuses on revenue, this makes their product better.  I’ll link to it once I dig it up).  Basically the argument was that the focus on revenue will lead to better software.  I think this needs to be clarified:  Focus on revenue coming from end […]