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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
Of the questions that get asked on the forums many are wround query optimisation and trying to understand why certain queries run one way and others another, hopefully the new blog from the query optimiser team will help the understanding.
I for one will add this to the top of my blog role.
The first blog is how to get the build statistics on the results of expressions, including the use of user defined functions.
http://blogs.msdn.com/queryoptteam/archive/2006/03/24/560089.aspx
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
Of the questions that get asked on the forums many are wround query optimisation and trying to understand why certain queries run one way and others another, hopefully the new blog from the query optimiser team will help the understanding.
I for one will add this to the top of my blog role.
The first blog is how to get the build statistics on the results of expressions, including the use of user defined functions.
http://blogs.msdn.com/queryoptteam/archive/2006/03/24/560089.aspx
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
While most of the preview versions of Windows Vista released to date have included a copy
of WinFX, it has been disabled by default. Although WinFX was present on disk, it was
necessary to go through an extra step to enable it.
This has caused speculation that the final release of Vista would not include
WinFX. Fortunately, it looks like this isn't the case, according to Bill Gates.
As Brian Randell
recently reported,
Bill Gates and Steve Sinofsky held an open mike question session at the Office 2007 Dev. Con.
Brian took the opportunity to ask Microsoft to clarify this issue.
Brian tells us that BillG's response was pretty clear: WinFX will be ON by default
in Windows Vista.
Yay! Of course, any other answer would have been pretty disappointing, but Yay
nonetheless.
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
Good news from Michael Swanson that all the sessions (well almost all) will be made available to view. This is great as not only will people who were unable to attend be able to get up to speed, but I can watch the sessions that overlapped with something else i wanted to watch.
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
If you've used IsNumeric in the past and thought it was pretty handy, then you may be interested in TryParse, another nifty little method that's been slipped into VB2005 without much of a fanfare.
TryParse takes a string and tries to parse it to a particular type. It will return True or False to signify whether the attempt to parse has succeeded. If it does succeed, then the method will pass back the parsed value as an output parameter.
Of course there has been a Parse method around for ages, but if that original method failed then it would throw an Exception. TryParse simply tries to parse the string, returns the Boolean result, but is good-natured about it if the parse fails.
I didn't find the syntax of TryParse immediately intuitive and so thought it might be useful to devise an example to show it in action. However, in the past few months I'd seen some really excellent examples of TryParse being used very efficiently and effectively. So after spending several long hours kicking dead-end ideas into the waste bin, I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t hope to improve on those.
The two examples that I made a note of when I saw them and thought "Must remember those!" were posted in the MSDN technical Forums. One was posted by Alex Moura of Microsoft and the other by Ken Tucker, MVP.
In both cases they used TryParse to offer a really neat solution to a problem.
In the first example, the question was how to read filenames in a directory and extract the digits from the filenames. Helpfully, the filenames were all formatted in the same way, two letters followed by four digits:
WW487487.exe
WW154874.exe
WW244874.exe
Alex's answer used TryParse like this:
For Each file As String In System.IO.Directory.GetFiles("c:\", "ww??????.exe")
Dim value As Integer
'Cleanup full path to get the file name only
file = IO.Path.GetFileName(file)
If Integer.TryParse(file.Substring(2, 6), value) Then
Console.WriteLine(value)
End If
Next
Ken’s fix was for a problem where a textbox would at some stage contain a date, ideally today’s date. At other times the textbox might be empty. TryParse used in this situation looked like this:
Dim dt As Date
If Date.TryParse(TextBox1.Text, dt) Then
If dt = My.Computer.Clock.LocalTime.Date Then
MessageBox.Show("Today is your day")
End If
End If
Notice how in both cases, not only does the method attempt to parse, but that it also passes back that parsed value – an integer in the first example and a date in the second - when the parsing succeeds.
So if you want a parse method with bells, whistles and quite a lot of flexibility you might want to give TryParse a run out.
My thanks and acknowledgements to Alex and Ken.
The links to the full original questions are:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=158084&SiteID=1
(Alex Moura)
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=214685&SiteID=1
(Ken Tucker)
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
Having spent thursday with lawrence biren talking about future business, talking about how his hotel expext and theatre expert sites have been doing so well (finally). I was shocked to get a call this afternoon from Lawrences close friend and business associate (Sandra Bruce) informing me that he passed away this morning from a heart [...]
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
Jim Homes reports on the MbUnit list that he gave a talk to the Dayton .NET User Group on OSS and free development tools, including NUnit (as a baseline), Fitnesse, MBUnit, Rhino.Mocks, Zanebug, TestDriven.NET, and Watir. He reports.
I spent ten or 15 minutes talking about MBUnit's goodness, and several folks were very happy to hear about it.
His presentation and code samples can be found here.
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
The flight home from Vegas was a killer overnight jobbie, yesterday was a bit of a write off. Today I feel better and after a session out in the rain digging the veg patch I feel heaps better :). So just starting to pick up emails and blogs now and the first thing that hits me is the news (via Robert) that Rotor 2 is out. Some neat features and bug fixes, looking forward to seeing whats different in this release and what has changed in the guts of the thing. Hoo-ra!
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
The Shared Source CLI (Rotor 2) provides an interesting peek into some of the source code to the .NET CLR 2. See my previous blog entry for information on where to get the download.
If you want to open up and view the source files in Visual Studio.NET then download a VS.NET 2005 project file from here. Extract the sscli20_20060311.tgz file to your hard drive and drop the project file into the sscli20 directory. Warning it may take some time for Visual Studio to display the contents.
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
Joshua Allen helped organize the microformats and structured blogging unofficial session at Mix this week with Marc Canter and Tantek.
Joshua has posted 6 predictions on the topic of microformats that are worth a read (thanks to Tommy for the pointer).
FWIW (inspired by Joshua) here are my six predictions on the topic:
- 2006 will be a hot year for microformats, but 2007 will be even hotter (am pointing to Chris as he was the first one to help me understand the significance - in a bar somewhere in San Francisco last year - thank you Chris).
- Most Microsoftees will not have heard of microformats nor know what they are by the end of 2006. But those Microsoftees that need to know, will.
- The OPML freaks will embrace microformats.
- Those who said structured blogging wouldn't take off will come around as they realize that using microformats in blogs is structured blogging
- Some people will say microformats won't take off, no matter what
- New microformat-based business will blossom over the next two years
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Tags (did you know these were microformats?): microformats structuredblogging opml web tech
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
Back again with new energy, new vigour and new shoes.
- Hello Again
- Writing a horror movie and discovering what’s important
- podcaststuff.co.uk
- Weird stuff I’ve seen this week
- No babies here thanks
Music from:
Captain WAM &
Adam Boucher
Courtesy of Podsafe Music Network
< click to download standard MP3.
Subscribe to this podcast
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
Missed this on Friday because of the Xbox 360 stuff, but MSFT has uploaded the newest "bugfix" release of Vista build 5342 on MS Connect now for testers to grab.
I havent as yet installed this build so no info. Remember to use the new product keys which you can request from MS Connect!
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
Missed this on Friday because of the Xbox 360 stuff, but MSFT has uploaded the newest "bugfix" release of Vista build 5342 on MS Connect now for testers to grab.
I havent as yet installed this build so no info. Remember to use the new product keys which you can request from MS Connect!
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
With the dust settling on the redesign of Travel Dive, I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to take a look at the decision behind redesigning the site, and the process and choices made when redeveloping it.
Over the next week or so I’ll be publishing a few articles analysing and dissecting the redesign and development of the Travel Dive website, from realising the failings of the original site to coming up with solutions and finding new ways of thinking to pull them off.
I was initially very hesitant to redesign Travel Dive. The site had been well received both from a design standpoint, and as provider of good quality content. It was fortunate enough to be showcased on several CSS galleries, and even made it into 9rules giving us some fairly considerable exposure.
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
VS 2005 has been the only application so far in which I have found a problem that’s clearly related to incompatibility with the new desktop composition done by DWM (Desktop Window Manager). It works for the most part, but apparently it has problems calculating the positions of certain on-screen elements. For example, with composition activated, [...]
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
One of the highlights for me at the MIX conference earlier this week was being able to chat with customers about the success they’ve had with sites they’ve built on top of ASP.NET 2.0 and IIS 6.
MySpace.com was definitely the biggest highlight. For those that aren’t familiar with MySpace.com, it is the fastest growing site on the Internet right now. They have 65 million registered subscribers, and are registering 260,000 new users each day. According to the Media Metrix report (an independent analyst firm) MySpace.com had more page views in February than all of the MSN and Google sites combined. That is some serious load.
They re-built and re-deployed their site on ASP.NET 2.0 shortly after we shipped last year. Some of the pretty amazing statistics Aber and Allen (the MySpace CTP and VP of Engineering who were both in BillG’s keynote session) shared at MIX about the MySpace.com site:
- MySpace.com is now processing 1.5 Billion page views per day
- MySpace.com handles 2.3 million concurrent users during the day
- MySpace.com’s average server CPU utilization went from 85% to 27% after moving (from another technology) to ASP.NET 2.0
Those lucky enough to attend MIX (or watch the web-casts online) were also able to see Allen demo the new Ajax Profile Personalization engine that MySpace is building using Atlas (which you can learn more about here – including watching a video by me building a to-do task list app from scratch with it), as well as attend the awesome “Building Mega-sites” talk that MySpace gave together with folks from Microsoft.com about real-world, super large-scale, development and deployment experiences.
Other great real-world Atlas deployments by customers that were highlighted at the MIX event included Squeet.com, PageFlakes.com, and TitleZ.com (you can click on the “showcase” tab on http://atlas.asp.net to read more about them and their experiences).
It is hearing stories like these that keeps me motivated and having fun. :-)
- Scott
P.S. In case you were wondering, the top-6 domains in terms of page-views in February according to Media Metrix were: 1) Yahoo, 2) MySpace, 3) MSN, 4) Ebay, 5) Google, and 6) Hotmail.
P.P.S. 4 of the top 6 sites (MySpace, MSN, Ebay and Hotmail) run on IIS and Windows. J
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
This is one funny thing I found while fiddling around with WPF, Cider and the other parts from the newest CTP release: every now and then it’s required to rebuild the complete solution. I suppose it’s not meant to be that way, but I’ve had all kinds of interesting effects. One time there was a [...]
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
One of the fantastic new features in WPF is the way many controls can use other controls (and a lot of other things apart from what would usually be regarded as controls) as content. I wanted to try this out, and I created a little sample program.
I started with a small WPF application that [...]
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
Scientists study the first pictures of the surface of the Red Planet taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
Visual Basic For Applications will be supported "for the forseeable future", said Microsoft's KD Hallman, a Visual Studio General Manager, speaking at the Office System Developer Conference. VBA is the version of Visual Basic that runs within Microsoft Office and other applications from both Microsoft and third parties.
VBA remains part of Office 2007; we should probably expect it to be the version following that as well; I'd say that is about when the "forseeable future" ends. It is not even fully deprecated. Although Microsoft is promoting VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office), the .NET approach to building custom Office solutions, VBA remains as the macro recorder in Office 2007.
Continuing support for VBA is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it's good because VBA has some advantages over VSTO. Here's a few:
- Office is COM. VBA is COM. VSTO is .NET, albeit with excellent integration.
- VBA can respond to certain document events that VSTO cannot handle. An example is keystroke events.
- VBA code is lighter weight (no .NET runtime needed) and more likely to work across different versions of Office.
Second, it shows that old-style VB has a continuing life. Even after the standalone VB 6.0 is no longer supported, the language will live on in the form of VBA.
Of course VSTO has advantages too. For things like enterprise integration, data access or web services, VSTO is preferable. Here's a summary on DevX of why you might choose VSTO; and here's an enthusiastic VSTO post from Chris Kunicki
Still, if VBA is working for you, it looks like there's no need to worry about Microsoft pulling the plug.
Tags:
vba
vsto
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
Microsoft will deliver a cross-platform
.NET runtime targeting Windows and Mac OS X, with Linux and Solaris under
consideration and licensed third-party implementations to be encouraged. It
will also be implemented for devices such as Windows Mobile.
Called Windows Presentation Foundation
Everywhere (WPF/E), this is not exactly a rival to Mono, the open-source implementation of
.NET for Linux and other operating systems. The idea of WPF/E is to enable web
designers to create XAML applets that run cross-platform, so the focus is on the
user interface, whereas Mono provides a comprehensive application framework. WPF/E
will be a small, the target being 2MB or less.
Even so, the scope of WPF/E goes beyond
what most of us envisaged when we saw the first early demos at Microsoft's PDC
last year. WPF/E is a runtime engine able to execute .NET intermediate language
(IL) as well as rendering XAML. This means it will run C# or VB.Net code. It
also contains its own audio/video multimedia engine, with no dependence on
Windows Media Player or Quicktime.
You will be able to use WPF/E in two ways. A
browser plug-in or ActiveX control enables WPF/E content in web pages, while
the engine can also be hosted by desktop applications. When hosted in a web
page, you can control the embedded applet through Javascript.
There is obvious overlap with the Compact
Framework, the current implementation of .NET for devices. Perhaps the two
things will merge at some future date. However, WPF/E is even smaller than the
Compact Framework. Don't imagine that all your .NET applications will
immediately run on Macs under WPF/E. Most of the .NET Framework class library
will not be implemented, so only the most trivial of applications is likely to
run without modification. It will probably work as a client for XML web
services.
The design tool for WPF/E will be
Expression, while programmers will use Visual Studio.
WPF/E is significant for all sorts of
reasons. While Microsoft appears to have little interest in .NET as a
cross-platform server technology, it is now making moves towards
establishing it as cross-platform on the client. If it delivers, it will make
XAML far more interesting to web developers.
A community tech preview of WPF/E is
promised for the summer (third quarter, to be precise), with final release in
the first half of 2007.
The above information is from a
presentation at Mix06 along with an interview
with Forest Key, Director of Developer Tools Product Management. More to follow
shortly.
Tags:
wpfe
mix06
xaml
mono
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
Ooh! How cool is this? It's an article about writing an iTunes plugin with .NET. This is for my "read when I have time" list.
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
I was holding off posting this but I cant help it now that a Spoof of the famous "Where The Bloody Hell Are You" ad has come out.
As always, streamed in the ultra-cool Vividas format:-) Go on, watch what all the bloody fuss is about.
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
I was holding off posting this but I cant help it now that a Spoof of the famous "Where The Bloody Hell Are You" ad has come out.
As always, streamed in the ultra-cool Vividas format:-) Go on, watch what all the bloody fuss is about.
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
I've uploaded some new shots of the Xbox 360 on the Dell 2405FPW showing just how much detail the console is pumping out, take for instance the dashboard:
Insane! You can view what the other UI elements look like for the Games, Media and Live UI's as well. Nextup is emulation and good old Halo 2 was loaded up. It required two updates (initially to load the game into the 360, then another inside the game itself for Live) Both these took hardly anytime to grab and made the game run, intro movies loaded as meant to, although loading the main menu (and the game mission) took a tad longer than I recall the game loading on the xbox.
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Xbox360 does a good job of running it too - cant even imagine the pain and trauma this would have created (emulating Intel/NVIDIA to PowerPC/ATI hardware!)
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
At South by South West, Mena Trott from Six Apart was a panelist in a session I saw. It dawned on me that you never see Mena and Dawn French in the same room at the same time...
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
I've uploaded some new shots of the Xbox 360 on the Dell 2405FPW showing just how much detail the console is pumping out, take for instance the dashboard:
Insane! You can view what the other UI elements look like for the Games, Media and Live UI's as well. Nextup is emulation and good old Halo 2 was loaded up. It required two updates (initially to load the game into the 360, then another inside the game itself for Live) Both these took hardly anytime to grab and made the game run, intro movies loaded as meant to, although loading the main menu (and the game mission) took a tad longer than I recall the game loading on the xbox.
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Xbox360 does a good job of running it too - cant even imagine the pain and trauma this would have created (emulating Intel/NVIDIA to PowerPC/ATI hardware!)
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Published on 25 Mar 2006 from
I've read some entertaining posts about IE 7 beta 2 comparing it to some other browsers. One in particular made me laugh though I can't post it as it included an expletive ;-( and I don't want to offend anyone. I've been surprised by the number of children that read my blog.
The post included the quote "The only reason I've been a fan of Firefox is for tabbed browsing and some illusion of security. IE is back, baby."
Browse here to download beta 2 for yourself. I love the tabbed groups, the Phishing filter and the facility to view a thumbnail of all open tabs. I know IE's been very slow to support tabs but the implementation is really nice now it's finally arrived.
