When developing software, it makes sense to 'fail early, fail often'; to become aware of mistakes quickly and to learn from them. This means being able to deliver software as early in development as possible. This makes it easier to gather opinions and promote discussions with the people who would want to use the application; and then respond to the feedback. … Read more
On 1st August, James Moore, head of the team at Red Gate who brought to the world the likes of SQL Prompt, SQL Compare and SQL Source Control, and responsible for the future strategy for SQL developer tools at Red Gate, set off on a “walkabout”, leaving a sizeable team to run itself, for an … Read more
We kicked off a new project a few months ago: rewriting ANTS Memory Profiler. As part of the project, we decided to give Scrum a try. The team was already reasonably Agile without explicitly adopting Scrum principles, as we had our EAP program in place when developing ANTS Performance Profiler. But hey, why not try something … Read more
So Microsoft has jumped on the Cloud bandwagon. I doubt there was a single person in the room who was surprised when Ray Ozzie got up on stage and announced their new Cloud OS, Windows Azure; but I’m sure many of us were interested to see Microsoft’s take on cloud computing. Personally I’m not convinced … Read more
Over the years I have installed Linux distro’s many many times – the first was sometime around Red Hat 4 and it has never been a pleasant experience, that is until I came to do it this morning. With trepidation I downloaded a copy of Ubuntu, burnt it to CD (kudos on the installation instructions … Read more
Improving the performance of your application often boils down to rephrasing the problem you are trying to solve. James discusses common pitfalls and problems when creating applications in .NET.… Read more
A year and a little bit ago, I sat down with Tom (head of development at Red Gate) to talk about what was next on the cards after SQL Data Compare. Tom asked that I join Helen and the rest of the SQL Backup team to act as technical lead on a new version of … Read more
I find that I end up custom painting a lot of the controls in Red Gate products, this is normally due to some gripe from our usability engineers – I was doing this today and wanted to gray scale some of the pngs when I need to show them disabled – This normally means loading up … Read more
Its always nice as a developer when you find a new tool to make your life easier – understanding what is actually happening during the execution of your application (rather than what you think is happening) is key to fixing those hard to find bugs. Visual Studio does a pretty good job of helping with … Read more
There was an article about some research which Akamai has done on user’s experiences of online stores – mainly with respect to loading times – on Slashdot yesterday and it appeared on BBC News this morning as well. Their headline conclusion was that if a web page took more than 4 seconds to load then … Read more
When checking for local instances of SQL Server its normally best enumerate the value of the registry key HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftMicrosoft SQL Server and then look at the value on installed instances. However on a 64 bit machine there are two keys, the 64 bit version and the 32 bit version for the machine so using the … Read more
I thought the Microsoft Research site deserved a mention as there are some great little projects on there. A pick of my favourites must include: AbsIL – the Abstract IL SDK – basically this gives you a AST of your assembly and a load of utilities for walking the AST and modifying it – there could … Read more
I have just spent the last hour or so trying to get a .NET’s regular expression to do what I want (matching a one of several possible keys followed by an = followed by a quoted string with possible escape chars in it – not difficult you would think). Unfortunately it seems every time you change platform or language you … Read more
In case you haven’t come across this before you can actually compare two views in SQL Data Compare. The only pre-requisite is that the view has an index defined on it. As an example lets create and compare an indexed view on pubs. First we must create the view with the schema binding option: We … Read more
While reading through the excellent http://blogs.msdn.com/ I noticed this post by Todd Carter talking abount ASP.NET and SQL Server Performance, in it he talks about compiler locks slowing down stored proceedure execution. Aparently this occurs when The user that runs the stored procedure is not the owner of the procedure AND The stored procedure name is not fully qualified … Read more
David C sent me an interesting link about the breaking changes between Beta 2 and the RTM, you can find the original summary at The Server Side.NET and Microsoft’s in-depth document here [.doc… Read more
