When I did my degree, nobody told me that my life would forever be cursed. Not once was I taken aside, sat down, and told in clear and simple words that my life would never be the same. Like hyperactive kittens faced with a vat of warm fishy milk, we lapped up the techniques to … Read more
This is sheer genius: System.Math.Sin( double a )System.Math.Cos( double a )…etc all take an angle in radians as their argument. However: System.Drawing.Drawing2D.Matrix.Rotate( float angle )and System.Drawing.Drawing2D.Matrix.Rotate( float angle, MatrixOrder order ) both take the angle in degrees. Who on earth designed this?!?? … Never mind, it’s not that important. I’m just going to take a … Read more
You can easily add your own exceptions into Visual Studio so that you do not need to add them in each time into your project when debugging your code. I have only checked this against Visual Studio 2003, but it looks like it would works the same in Visual Studio 2000 and Visual Studio 2005. … Read more
Producing unreadable Transact SQL is something of an art form. We all know that the best Transact SQL Style is to make everything elegant and obvious, with explanatory identifiers, liberal comments and deft formatting. It doesn’t always happen, for a number of reasons. One of the more subtle effects of acute caffein poisoning is to … Read more
There seems to be computer game written in almost every language out there but I haven’t yet found one written in Transact SQL. I thought that poor old DBAs should have some form of game to play so I have written a little 3D maze game in Transact SQL. Since there is no obvious way … Read more
Having fixed all the outstanding “Oh my [deity/dictator of choice], we have to fix this now or people will be really rather unhappy” issues (as they’re referred to under our bug tracking system. Or is that my imagination? You know, I think it probably is) against DTS Package Compare 2.0, it was time to turn … Read more
Well not only have we got the currently running SQL Data Compare Beta – well SQL Tools beta really but that’s the important bit ;). We have the new DTS Compare Beta, we’re going to be starting work on the next update of our brilliant SQL Log Rescue tool too. Not only all that but … Read more
There are times when you’re striving for a usable design, and no matter what you try, your attempt just fails to cut the mustard. Everyone has a difference of opinion as to what should be done to fix it and you’re stuck there trying to think of a sensible improvement. What to do? Time to … Read more
We are now ‘feature complete’ and only have a few weeks until we have code lock off. The beta program has in the region of 75 customers signed up, many of which are actively posting feedback on the private forum. The comments have been encouraging. The beta testers have been carrying out some impressive tests, … Read more
If you ask me, and I take it as implicit by your visit that you do (sorry about that, but it’s Friday afternoon and I need a weekend), Windows is far too facist about filenames. Most notably in terms of the characters one can put into a filename, and the obstreperous way it will cough … Read more
.NET automatically generates a FileInformation resource when building the assembly. Here is a mapping of the .NET attribute to the corresponding named element in VersionInformation and the name that Windows Explorer puts on its UI. Assembly Attribute VersionInfo Windows Explore name AssemblyTitle FileDescription Description AssemblyDescription Comments Comments AssemblyConfiguration AssemblyCompany CompanyName Company AssemblyCopyright LegalCopyright Copyright AssemblyTrademark … Read more
The new SQL Data Compare beta is about to be released and I hope you all get a chance to have a good look at it and send me your opinions. There are a few features that we are quite proud of mostly of course these are surrounding our new Yukon support, SQL Server 2005 … Read more
Ahhh… now… er… that shouldn’t happen. Oooh, yup, that’s not at all clear. Purrr, Meow, Purrr. Hmmm… they’re not finding that and why are they trying there? Reviewing a usability trial recording is akin to playing the role of a detective. You can’t be one of those detectives who, week after week, fail to solve … Read more
OK, so I’ll admit this is a bit cheeky: this entry should almost certainly be .NET Oddities #2a because it’s so closely related to #2, but there. You may have noticed, and in fact I already knew this, that OutOfMemoryException (like StackOverflowException) has a null value for its StackTrace property. Again, this can be a … Read more
When developing a COM based application sometimes it’s sometimes useful to register all the DLLs/OCX at once.From a command prompt This will try to register all dll’s even if they are not COM dlls. This is fine as the registration will fail silently.You can change the above command to register COM servers eg… Read more
Check out John Robbins November 05 Bugslayer article.. He has ported his excellent SUPERASSRT code from native C++ into C#. Part of his solution uses CDB.(a command line version of WinDBG)I have previously found producing minidump files very useful in tracking down native code problems, so I will be trying out his new C# implementation … Read more
I must admit that creating a nice type safe collection for a new feature in one of our products took me a little time. There are some very good resources online on how to setup your own type safe collection so I thought I’d contribute a little to that resource. The key to all this … Read more
Occasionally when developing software you come across really absurd or bizarre bugs. The user interface for the application I’m currently developing recently exhibited one of these: a propensity for beeping periodically, for no readily explicable reason. To be precise, not so much a beeping as a “ding”ing. Now like most software developers, I work in … 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
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