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
In the most recent issue of the economist’s “Technology Quarterly” there is an article about one of the oldest inventions ever – the humble cooking stove. Why was this important, but decidedly “low-tech”, device being featured alongside netbooks, botnets and exafloods? The article described a project for producing stoves for refugees in Darfur. The stoves … 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 past few years we’ve seen a proliferation of new technologies from Microsoft. We have WPF, WWF, WCS, WCF, Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, The entity framework, LINQ, Expression Studio, TFS, DLR, DSL… The list already appears endless, and in another two years we can probably add another half dozen technologies based around Windows 7, the … 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
Wow, Lionel pointed me towards some news today announced on Scott Gutrie’s blog. Microsoft are to release the framework libraries source code with Visual Studio 2008. Seems like my usage of reflector will be going down!… Read more
There has been plenty of response to my interview a few days ago with Simple-Talk – rather than trying to cram all of my thoughts into the size of a comment box I thought I would spend a little more time and try and respond to people more fully here. Mike O’Neil pointed out Visual … 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
Thought I better post this incase you havn’t seen it – If you are using SQL Server 2005 maintainance tasks and upgrade to sp2 be ready for a nasty suprise. If you have a Maintenance cleanup task or a history clean up task your units which used to be measured in days are now measured in … Read more
After what seems like an age I am pleased to announce the release of the Backup 5.0 beta. Its a highly exciting time for all of us on the SQL Backup team and we are looking forward to seeing what you have to say about the new version of SQL Backup. From the release notes: … 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
I dont quite know when this appeared but Microsoft have added the sysinternals stuff to technet – If you havn’t used sysinternals tools before then you are missing a real treat – I have lost count of the amount of times they have helped me debug some particularly tricky low level problem. Anyway the link … 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
Rick Brewster has put up a post on his blog about Paint .NET v3 which will now support MDI – my one and only gripe with the current version of this wonderful little tool. I love this tool it is great to see what can be achived with Windows Forms and .NET in what is … Read more
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