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Articles indexed Tuesday March 16 2010

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• Back-sliding into Unmanaged Code

  - by Laila

  It is difficult to write about Microsoft's ambivalence to .NET without mentioning clichés about dog food.  In case you've been away a long time, you'll remember that Microsoft surprised everyone with the speed and energy with which it introduced and evangelised the .NET Framework for managed code. There was good reason for this. Once it became obvious to all that it had sleepwalked into third place as a provider of development languages, behind Borland and Sun, it reacted quickly to attract the best talent in the industry to produce a windows version of the Java runtime, with Bounds-checking, Automatic Garbage collection, structures exception handling and common data types. To develop applications for this managed runtime, it produced several excellent languages, and more are being provided. The only thing Microsoft ever got wrong was to give it a stupid name. The logical step for Microsoft would be to base the entire operating system on the .NET framework, and to re-engineer its own applications. In 2002, Bill Gates, then Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect said about their plans for .NET, "This is a long-term approach. These things don't happen overnight." Now, eight years later, we're still waiting for signs of the 'long-term approach'. Microsoft's vision of an entirely managed operating system has subsided since the Vista fiasco, but stays alive yet dormant as Midori, still being developed by Microsoft Research. This is an Internet-centric fork of the singularity operating system, a research project started in 2003 to build a highly-dependable operating system in which the kernel, device drivers, and applications are all written in managed code. Midori is predicated on the prevalence of connected systems, with provisions for distributed concurrency where application components exist 'in the cloud', and supports a programming model that can tolerate cancellation, intermittent connectivity and latency. It features an entirely new security model that sandboxes applications for increased security. So have Microsoft converted its existing applications to the .NET framework? It seems not. What Windows applications can run on Mono? Very few, it seems. We all thought that .NET spelt the end of DLL Hell and the need for COM interop, but it looks as if Bill Gates' idea of 'not overnight' might stretch to a decade or more. The Operating System has shown only minimal signs of migrating to .NET. Even where the use of .NET has come to dominate, when used for server applications with IIS, IIS itself is still entirely developed in unmanaged code. This is an irritation to Microsoft's greatest supporters who committed themselves fully to the NET framework, only to find parts of the Ambivalent Microsoft Empire quietly backsliding into unmanaged code and the awful C++. It is a strategic mistake that the invigorated Apple didn't make with the Mac OS X Architecture. Cheers, Laila

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• .NET Reflector & .NET Reflector Pro 6.1 have been released

  - by Bart Read

  .NET Reflector 6.1 and .NET Reflector Pro 6.1 have been released. You can download them from: http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/index.htm .NET Reflector is a class browser and disassembler for .NET assemblies. .NET Reflector Pro is a Visual Studio debugging extension that allows you to step through third party and framework assemblies, as if they were built from your own source code. This release fixes several problems that were present in the 6.0 release: Support for using a copy of Reflector.cfg stored alongside Reflector.exe has been re-enabled so users upgrading from 5.x releases will not lose their settings. Fixed unhandled exception on exit of Visual Studio when .NET Reflector add-in used in conjunction with TestDriven.NET add-in. Added better support for dealing with framework assemblies, which only contain meta-data, in the "Referenced Assemblies" folder. Fixed problem where attempted decompilation with CppCliLanguage add-in would lead to display of a page on the Red Gate website. Added option to activate .NET Reflector Pro to .NET Reflector menu in Visual Studio after receiving feedback from a number of users that it was hard to figure out how to activate the product. For more details about the products please visit: http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/index.htm

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• Kill a tree, save your website? Content strategy in action, part III

  - by Roger Hart

  A lot has been written about how driving content strategy from within an organisation is hard. And that's true. Red Gate is pretty receptive to new ideas, so although I've not had a total walk in the park, it's been a hike with charming scenery. But I'm one of the lucky ones. Lots of people are involved in content, and depending on your organisation some of those people might be the kind who'll gleefully call themselves "stakeholders". People holding a stake generally want to stick it through something's heart and bury it at a crossroads. Winning them over is not always easy. (Richard Ingram has made a nice visual summary of how this can feel - Content strategy Snakes & ladders - pdf ) So yes, a lot of content strategy advocates are having a hard time. And sure, we've got a nice opportunity to get together and have a hug and a cry, but in the interim we could use a hand. What to do? My preferred approach is, I'll confess, brutal. I'd like nothing so much as to take a scorched earth approach to our website. Burn it, salt the ground, and build the new one right: focusing on clearly delineated business and user content goals, and instrumented so we can tell if we're doing it right. I'm never getting buy-in for that, but a boy can dream. So how about just getting buy-in for some small, tenable improvements? Easier, but still non-trivial. I sat down for a chat with our marketing and design guys. It seemed like a good place to start, even if they weren't up for my "Ctrl-A + Delete"  solution. We talked through some of this stuff, and we pretty much agreed that our content is a bit more broken than we'd ideally like. But to get everybody on board, the problems needed visibility. Doing a visual content inventory Print out the internet. Make a Wall Of Content. Seriously. If you've already done a content inventory, you know your architecture, and you know the scale of the problem. But it's quite likely that very few other people do. So make it big and visual. I'm going to carbon hell, but it seems to be working. This morning, I printed out a tiny, tiny part of our website: the non-support content pertaining to SQL Compare I made big, visual, A3 blowups of each page, and covered a wall with them. A page per web page, spread over something like 6M x 2M, with metrics, right in front of people. Even if nobody reads it (and they are doing) the sheer scale is shocking. 53 pages, all told. Some are redundant, some outdated, some trivial, a few fantastic, and frighteningly many that are great ideas delivered not-quite-right. You have to stand quite far away to get it all in your field of vision. For a lot of today, a whole bunch of folks have been gawping in amazement, talking each other through it, peering at the details, and generally getting excited about content. Developers, sales guys, our CEO, the marketing folks - they're engaged. Will it last? I make no promises. But this sort of wave of interest is vital to getting a content strategy project kicked off. While the content strategist is a saucer-eyed orphan in the cupboard under the stairs, they're not getting a whole lot done. Of course, just printing the site won't necessarily cut it. You have to know your content, and be able to talk about it. Ideally, you'll also have page view and time-on-page metrics. One of the most powerful things you can do is, when people are staring at your wall of content, ask them what they think half of it is for. Pretty soon, you've made a case for content strategy. We're also going to get folks to mark it up - cover it with notes and post-its, let us know how they feel about our content. I'll be blogging about how that goes, but it's exciting. Different business functions have different needs from content, so the more exposure the content gets, and the more feedback, the more you know about those needs. Fingers crossed for awesome.

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• Finance: Friends, not foes!

  - by red@work

  After reading Phil's blog post about his experiences of working on reception, I thought I would let everyone in on one of the other customer facing roles at Red Gate... When you think of a Credit Control team, most might imagine money-hungry (and often impolite) people, who will do nothing short of hunting people down until they pay up. Well, as with so many things, not at Red Gate! Here we do things a little bit differently.   Since joining the Licensing, Invoicing and Credit Control team at Red Gate (affectionately nicknamed LICC!), I have found it fantastic to work with people who know that often the best way to get what you want is by being friendly, reasonable and as helpful as possible. The best bit about this is that, because everyone is in a good mood, we have a great working atmosphere! We are definitely a very happy team. We laugh a lot, even when dealing with the serious matter of playing table football after lunch. The most obvious part of my job is bringing in money. There are few things quite as satisfying as receiving a big payment or one that you've been chasing for a long time. That being said, it's just as nice to encounter the companies that surprise you with a payment bang on time after little or no chasing. It's always a pleasure to find these people who are generous and easy to work with, and so they always make me smile, too. As I'm in one of the few customer facing roles here, I get to experience firsthand just how much Red Gate customers love our software and are equally impressed with our customer service. We regularly get replies from people thanking us for our help in resolving a problem or just to simply say that they think we're great. Or, as is often the case, that we 'rock and are awesome'! When those are the kinds of emails you have to deal with for most of the day, I would challenge anyone to be unhappy! The best thing about my work is that, much like Phil and his counterparts on reception, I get to talk to people from all over the world, and experience their unique (and occasionally unusual) personality traits. I deal predominantly with customers in the US, so I'll be speaking to someone from a high flying multi-national in New York one minute, and then the next phone call will be to a small office on the outskirts of Alabama. This level of customer involvement has led to a lot of interesting anecdotes and plenty of in-jokes to keep us amused! Obviously there are customers who are infuriating, like those who simply tell us that they will pay "one day", and that we should stop chasing them. Then there are the people who say that they ordered the tools because they really like them, but they just can't afford to actually pay for them at the moment. Thankfully these situations are relatively few and far between, and for every one customer that makes you want to scream, there are far, far more that make you smile!

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• Inappropriate Updates?

  - by Tony Davis

  A recent Simple-talk article by Kathi Kellenberger dissected the fastest SQL solution, submitted by Peter Larsson as part of Phil Factor's SQL Speed Phreak challenge, to the classic "running total" problem. In its analysis of the code, the article re-ignited a heated debate regarding the techniques that should, and should not, be deemed acceptable in your search for fast SQL code. Peter's code for running total calculation uses a variation of a somewhat contentious technique, sometimes referred to as a "quirky update": SET @Subscribers = Subscribers = @Subscribers + PeopleJoined - PeopleLeft This form of the UPDATE statement, @variable = column = expression, is documented and it allows you to set a variable to the value returned by the expression. Microsoft does not guarantee the order in which rows are updated in this technique because, in relational theory, a table doesn’t have a natural order to its rows and the UPDATE statement has no means of specifying the order. Traditionally, in cases where a specific order is requires, such as for running aggregate calculations, programmers who used the technique have relied on the fact that the UPDATE statement, without the WHERE clause, is executed in the order imposed by the clustered index, or in heap order, if there isn’t one. Peter wasn’t satisfied with this, and so used the ingenious device of assuring the order of the UPDATE by the use of an "ordered CTE", based on an underlying temporary staging table (a heap). However, in either case, the ordering is still not guaranteed and, in addition, would be broken under conditions of parallelism, or partitioning. Many argue, with validity, that this reliance on a given order where none can ever be guaranteed is an abuse of basic relational principles, and so is a bad practice; perhaps even irresponsible. More importantly, Microsoft doesn't wish to support the technique and offers no guarantee that it will always work. If you put it into production and it breaks in a later version, you can't file a bug. As such, many believe that the technique should never be tolerated in a production system, under any circumstances. Is this attitude justified? After all, both forms of the technique, using a clustered index to guarantee the order or using an ordered CTE, have been tested rigorously and are proven to be robust; although not guaranteed by Microsoft, the ordering is reliable, provided none of the conditions that are known to break it are violated. In Peter's particular case, the technique is being applied to a temporary table, where the developer has full control of the data ordering, and indexing, and knows that the table will never be subject to parallelism or partitioning. It might be argued that, in such circumstances, the technique is not really "quirky" at all and to ban it from your systems would server no real purpose other than to deprive yourself of a reliable technique that has uses that extend well beyond the running total calculations. Of course, it is doubly important that such a technique, including its unsupported status and the assumptions that underpin its success, is fully and clearly documented, preferably even when posting it online in a competition or forum post. Ultimately, however, this technique has been available to programmers throughout the time Sybase and SQL Server has existed, and so cannot be lightly cast aside, even if one sympathises with Microsoft for the awkwardness of maintaining an archaic way of doing updates. After all, a Table hint could easily be devised that, if specified in the WITH (<Table_Hint_Limited>) clause, could be used to request the database engine to do the update in the conventional order. Then perhaps everyone would be satisfied. Cheers, Tony.

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• Why not to use StackTrace to find what method called you

  - by Alex.Davies

  Our obfuscator, SmartAssembly, does some pretty crazy reflection. It's an obfuscator, it's sort of its job to do things in the most awkward way possible. But sometimes, you can go too far. One such time is this little gem from the strings encoding feature: StackTrace stackTrace = new StackTrace(); StackFrame frame = stackTrace.GetFrame(1); Type ownerType = frame.GetMethod().DeclaringType; It's designed to find the type where the calling method is defined. A user found that strings encoding occasionally broke on x64 systems. Very strange. After some debugging (thank god for Reflector Pro, it would be impossible to debug processed assemblies without it) I found that the ownerType I got back was wrong. The reason is that the x64 JIT does tail call optimisation. This saves space on the stack, and speeds things up, by throwing away a method's stack frame if the last thing that it calls is the only thing returned. When this happens, the call to StackTrace faithfully tells you that the calling method is the one that called the one we really wanted. So using StackTrace isn't safe for anything other than debugging, and it will make your code fail in unpredictable ways. Don't use it!

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• Creating an ITemplate from a String

  - by Damon

  I do a lot of work with control templates, and one of the pieces of functionality that I've always wanted is the ability to build a ITemplate from a string.  Throughout the years, the topic has come up from time to time, and I never really found anything about how to do it. though I have run across a number of postings from people who are also wanting the same capability.  As I was messing around with things the other day, I stumbled on how to make it work and I feel really foolish for not figuring it out sooner. ITemplate is an interface that exposes a single method named InstantiateIn.  I've been searching for years for some magical .NET framework component that would take a string and convert it into an ITemplate, when all along I could just build my own.  Here's the code: /// <summary> ///   Allows string-based ITempalte implementations /// </summary> public class StringTemplate : ITemplate {     #region Constructor(s)     ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////     /// <summary>     ///   Constructor     /// </summary>     /// <param name="template">String based version of the control template.</param>     public StringTemplate(string template)     {         Template = template;     }     /// <summary>     ///   Constructor     /// </summary>     /// <param name="template">String based version of the control template.</param>     /// <param name="copyToContainer">True to copy intermediate container contents to the instantiation container, False to leave the intermediate container in place.</param>     public StringTemplate(string template, bool copyToContainer)     {         Template = template;         CopyToContainer = copyToContainer;     }     ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////     #endregion     #region Properties     ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////     /// <summary>     ///   String based template     /// </summary>     public string Template     {         get;         set;     }     /// <summary>     ///   When a StringTemplate is instantiated it is created inside an intermediate control     ///   due to limitations of the .NET Framework.  Specifying True for the CopyToContainer     ///   property copies all the controls from the intermediate container into instantiation     ///   container passed to the InstantiateIn method.     /// </summary>     public bool CopyToContainer     {         get;         set;     }     ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////     #endregion     #region ITemplate Members     ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////     /// <summary>     ///   Creates the template in the specified control.     /// </summary>     /// <param name="container">Control in which to make the template</param>     public void InstantiateIn(Control container)     {         Control tempContainer = container.Page.ParseControl(Template);         if (CopyToContainer)         {             for (int i = tempContainer.Controls.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--)             {                 Control tempControl = tempContainer.Controls[i];                 tempContainer.Controls.RemoveAt(i);                 container.Controls.AddAt(0, tempControl);             }                         }         else         {             container.Controls.Add(tempContainer);         }     }     ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////     #endregion } //class Converting a string into a user control is fairly easy using the ParseControl method from a Page object.  Fortunately, the container passed into the InstantiateIn method has a Page property.  One caveat, however, is that the Page property only has a reference to a Page if the container is located ON the page.  If you run into this problem, you may have to find a creative way to get the Page reference (you can add it to the constructor, store it in the request context, etc).  Another issue that I ran into is that the ParseControl creates a new control, parses the string template, places any controls defined in the template onto the new control it created, and returns that new control with the template on it.  You cannot pass in your own container. Adding this directly to the container provided as a parameter in the InstantiateIn means that you end up with an additional "level" in the control hierarchy.  To avoid this, I added code in that removes each control from the intermediate container and places it into the actual container.  I am not, however, sure about the performance penalty associated with moving a bunch of control from one place to another, nor am I completely sure if doing such a move completely screws something up if you have a code behind, etc.  It seems to work when it's just a template, but my testing was ever-so-slightly shy of thorough when it comes to other crazy scenarios.  As a catch-all, I added a Boolean property called CopyToContainer that allows you to turn the copying on or off depending on your desires and needs. Technorati Tags: .NET,ASP.NET,ITemplate,Development,C#,Custom Controls,Server Controls

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• .NET Reflector Pro Support: How do I activate .NET Reflector Pro with my serial number?

  - by Bart Read

  This is actually very straightforward, once you know where to look for it. Open up a version of Visual Studio into which you've installed the .NET Reflector add-in. Now on the main menu bar click .NET Reflector > Choose Assemblies to Debug (figure 1). Figure 1. Bring up the "Choose Assemblies to Debug" dialog from the .NET Reflector menu. The .NET Reflector Pro trial dialog will appear as shown in figure 2. Figure 2. Click Activate in the trial dialog. At this point just click Activate....(read more)

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• .NET Reflector 6, .NET Reflector Pro, TestDriven.NET, .NET 4.0 and Mono

  - by Bart Read

  By now you may well have noticed that .NET Reflector 6 and .NET Reflector Pro are out in the wild. The official launch happened today, although we actually put the software out last Thursday as part of a phased release plan to ensure that everything went smoothly today which, so far, it seems to have done. Clive and Alex have already talked extensively about what the new version and the Pro extension do, so I'm not going to go into any detail here, but I've linked to their blogs at the bottom. What...(read more)

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• Reflector Pro has now been released!

  - by CliveT

  After moving into the .NET division in May , and having a great time working on Reflector, I'm pleased to say that the results of that work are now available. Reflector Pro has now been released! The old Reflector as you know and love it is still available free of charge, and as part of this project we've fixed a number of bugs in the de-compilation that have been around for a long time. The Pro version comes as an add-in for Visual Studio - this offers dynamic de-compilation and generation of pdb files which allow you to step into the de-compiled code. Alex has some good pictures of this functionality on his beta post from around a month ago. Thanks to the other guys who've worked on this for taking me along for the ride - Alex, Andrew, Bart and Jason. Stephen did some great usability work, Chris Alford did some great technical authoring and Laila handled the launch publicity. Like all projects, there's always more I'd like to have done, but what we have looks like a pretty powerful addition to the developer's set of tools to me. Please try it and give us feedback on the forum.

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• Supporting users if they're not on your site

  - by Roger Hart

  Have a look at this Read Write Web article, specifically the paragraph in bold and the comments. Have a wry chuckle, or maybe weep for the future of humanity - your call. Then pause, and worry about information architecture. The short story: Read Write Web bumps up the Google rankings for "Facebook login" at the same time as Facebook makes UI changes, and a few hundred users get confused and leave comments on Read Write Web complaining about not being able to log in to their Facebook accounts.* Blindly clicking the first Google result is not a navigation behaviour I'd anticipated for folks visiting big names sites like Facebook. But then, I use Launchy and don't know where any of my files are, depend on Firefox auto-complete, view Facebook through my IM client, and don't need a map to find my backside with both hands. Not all our users behave in the same way, which means not all of our architecture is within our control, and people can get to your content in all sorts of ways. Even if the Read Write Web episode is a prank of some kind (there are, after all, plenty of folks who enjoy orchestrated trolling) it's still a useful reminder. Your users may take paths through and to your content you cannot control, and they are unlikely to deconstruct their assumptions along the way. I guess the meaningful question is: can you still support those users? If they get to you from Google instead of your front door, does what they find still make sense? Does your information architecture still work if your guests come in through the bathroom window? Ok, so here they broke into the house next door - you can't be expected to deal with that. But the rest is well worth thinking about. Other off-site interaction It's rarely going to be as funny as the comments at Read Write Web, but your users are going to do, say, and read things they think of as being about you and your products, in places you don't control. That's good. If you pay attention to it, you get data. Your users get a better experience. There are easy wins, too. Blogs, forums, social media &c. People may look for and find help with your product on blogs and forums, on Twitter, and what have you. They may learn about your brand in the same way. That's fine, it's an interaction you can be part of. It's time-consuming, certainly, but you have the option. You won't get a blogger to incorporate your site navigation just in case your users end up there, but you can be there when they do. Again, Anne Gentle, Gordon McLean and others have covered this in more depth than I could. Direct contact Sales people, customer care, support, they all talk to people. Are they sending links to your content? if so, which bits? Do they know about all of it? Do they have the content they need to support them - messaging that funnels sales, FAQ that are realistically frequent, detailed examples of things people want to do, that kind of thing. Are they sending links because users can't find the good stuff? Are they sending précis of your content, or re-writes, or brand new stuff? If so, does that mean your content isn't up to scratch, or that you've got content missing? Direct sales/care/support interactions are enormously valuable, and can help you know what content your users find useful. You can't have a table of contents or a "See also" in a phonecall, but your content strategy can support more interactions than browsing. *Passing observation about Facebook. For plenty if folks, it is  the internet. Its services are simple versions of what a lot of people use the internet for, and they're aggregated into one stop. Flickr, Vimeo, Wordpress, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all sorts of games, have Facebook doppelgangers that are not only friendlier to entry-level users, they're right there, behind only one layer of authentication. As such, it could own a lot of interaction convention. Heavy users may well not be tech-savvy, and be quite change averse. That doesn't make this episode not dumb, but I'm happy to go easy on 'em.

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• SMTP POP3 & PST. Acronyms from Hades.

  - by mikef

  A busy SysAdmin will occasionally have reason to curse SMTP. It is, certainly, one of the strangest events in the history of IT that such a deeply flawed system, designed originally purely for campus use, should have reached its current dominant position. The explanation was that it was the first open-standard email system, so SMTP/POP3 became the internet standard. We are, in consequence, dogged with a system with security weaknesses so extreme that messages are sent in plain text and you have no real assurance as to who the message came from anyway (SMTP-AUTH hasn't really caught on). Even without the security issues, the use of SMTP in an office environment provides a management nightmare to all commercial users responsible for complying with all regulations that control the conduct of business: such as tracking, retaining, and recording company documents. SMTP mail developed from various Unix-based systems designed for campus use that took the mail analogy so literally that mail messages were actually delivered to the users, using a 'store and forward' mechanism. This meant that, from the start, the end user had to store, manage and delete messages. This is a problem that has passed through all the releases of MS Outlook: It has to be able to manage mail locally in the dreaded PST file. As a stand-alone system, Outlook is flawed by its neglect of any means of automatic backup. Previous Outlook PST files actually blew up without warning when they reached the 2 Gig limit and became corrupted and inaccessible, leading to a thriving industry of 3rd party tools to clear up the mess. Microsoft Exchange is, of course, a server-based system. Emails are less likely to be lost in such a system if it is properly run. However, there is nothing to stop users from using local PSTs as well. There is the additional temptation to load emails into mobile devices, or USB keys for off-line working. The result is that the System Administrator is faced by a complex hybrid system where backups have to be taken from Servers, and PCs scattered around the network, where duplication of emails causes storage issues, and document retention policies become impossible to manage. If one adds to that the complexity of mobile phone email readers and mail synchronization, the problem is daunting. It is hardly surprising that the mood darkens when SysAdmins meet and discuss PST Hell. If you were promoted to the task of tormenting the souls of the damned in Hades, what aspects of the management of Outlook would you find most useful for your task? I'd love to hear from you. Cheers, Michael

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• How much will .NET Reflector Pro cost?

  - by Bart Read

  Somebody asked about this on our beta support forum earlier, so I thought I'd mirror the information I posted in my response here as well. We're going to make full pricing information available with the product is released, but for now I can say that .NET Reflector Pro will initially cost $195 for a single user license, with discounts available for multi-user licenses, which follows a similar pattern to our other products. .NET Reflector Pro will also be added to the .NET Developer Tools bundle,...(read more)

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• A Plea for Plain English

  - by Tony Davis

  The English language has, within a lifetime, emerged as the ubiquitous 'international language' of scientific, political and technical communication. On the one hand, learning a single, common language, International English, has made it much easier to participate in and adopt new technologies; on the other hand it must be exasperating to have to use English at international conferences, or on community sites, when your own language has a long tradition of scientific and technical usage. It is also hard to master the subtleties of using a foreign language to explain advanced ideas. This requires English speakers to be more considerate in their writing. Even if you’re used to speaking English, you may be brought up short by this sort of verbiage… "Business Intelligence delivering actionable insights is becoming more critical in the enterprise, and these insights require large data volumes for trending and forecasting" It takes some imagination to appreciate the added hassle in working out what it means, when English is a language you only use at work. Try, just to get a vague feel for it, using Google Translate to translate it from English to Chinese and back again. "Providing actionable business intelligence point of view is becoming more and more and more business critical, and requires that these insights and projected trends in large amounts of data" Not easy eh? If you normally use a different language, you will need to pause for thought before finally working out that it really means … "Every Business Intelligence solution must be able to help companies to make decisions. In order to detect current trends, and accurately predict future ones, we need to analyze large volumes of data" Surely, it is simple politeness for English speakers to stop peppering their writing with a twisted vocabulary that renders it inaccessible to everyone else. It isn’t just the problem of writers who use long words to give added dignity to their prose. It is the use of Colloquial English. This changes and evolves at a dizzying rate, adding new terms and idioms almost daily; it is almost a new and separate language. By contrast, ‘International English', is gradually evolving separately, at its own, more sedate, pace. As such, all native English speakers need to make an effort to learn, and use it, switching from casual colloquial patter into a simpler form of communication that can be widely understood by different cultures, even if it gives you less credibility on the street. Simple-Talk is based, at least in part, on the idea that technical articles can be written simply and clearly in a form of English that can be easily understood internationally, and that they can be written, with a little editorial help, by anyone, and read by anyone, regardless of their native language. Cheers, Tony.

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• Resolving the Access is Denied Error in VSeWSS Deployments

  - by Damon

  Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 1.3 (VSeWSS 1.3) tends to make my life easier unless I'm typing out the words that make up the VSeWSS acronym - really, what a mouthful.  But one of the problems that I routinely encounter are error messages when trying to deploy solutions.  These normally look something like the following: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)) I tried a variety of steps to resolve this issue: Recycling the application pool Restarting IIS Closing Visual Studio Not detaching from the debugger until a request was fully completed Logging off and logging back into Windows etc. Nothing actually worked.  Some of these resolution attempts seemed to help keep the problem from happening quite as frequently, but I still have no idea what EXACTLY causes the problem and it would rear its ugly head from time to time.  Unfortunately, the only resolution I found that seemed to work was to reboot the machine . which is a crappy resolution. Finally sick enough of the problem to spend some time on it, I went on a search and tried to figure out if anyone else was having this issue.  People seem to suggest that turning off the Indexing Service on your machine helps resolve this problem.  I tried turning it off but I kept having issues.  Which was depressing.  Fortunately, I stumbled upon the resolution when I was looking through the services list.  If you encounter the issue, all you have to do is reset the World Wide Web Publishing Service.  I've had a 100% success rate so far with this approach.  I'm not sure if having the Indexing Service is part of the solution, but I've kept it disabled for the time being because I'm really sick of having to reboot my machine to deal with that error message. If you do VSeWSS development, you may also want to check out this blog post: VSeWSS 1.3 - Getting around the "Unable to load one or more of the requested types" Error

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• Open source gravatar-like implementations?

  - by Tauren

  I'm already using gravatar icons for the users of my web service. However, I'm finding several problems with this approach: Only a small percentage of the users take the time to set up a gravatar profile. My users are not tech-savvy, but would be likely to add a dedicated photo to my site. Users of my service are encouraged to use images that depict them in proper uniform for the industry my service relates to. They wouldn't want that same picture to be used for personal purposes throughout the internet. They would not take the time or effort to manage a separate email address and gravatar account just to have an "in-uniform" profile photo for my service. Before I implement my own profile image feature, I was wondering if there are any open-source solutions that I could leverage with similar features to gravatar. Specifically: The ability to display any size thumbnail (up to 512px would be fine) Takes care of caching different sized thumbnails Has support for something like identicons, preferably pluggable with different style algorithms (monsters, etc.), even better if I can customize these Ability to fall-back to gravatar if no photo found Does anything like this exist? I haven't found it yet if it does.

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• C# + Format TimeSpan

  - by Villager

  Hello, I am trying to format a TimeSpan element in the format of "[minutes]:[seconds]". In this format, 2 minutes and 8 seconds would look like "02:08". I have tried a variety of options with String.Format and the ToString methods, but I get a FormatException. This is what I'm currently trying: DateTime startTime = DateTime.Now; // Do Stuff TimeSpan duration = DateTime.Now.Subtract(startTime); Console.WriteLine("[paragraph of information] Total Duration: " + duration.ToString("mm:ss")); What am I doing wrong? How do I format a TimeSpan element using my desired format? Thank you

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• How do I know if my PHP application is using too much memory?

  - by John

  I'm working on a PHP web application that let's users network with each other, book events, message etc... I launched it a few months ago and at the moment, there's only about 100 users. I set up the application on a VPS with ubuntu 9.10, apache 2, mysql 5 and php 5. I had 360 Mb of RAM, but upgraded to 720 MB a few minutes ago. Lately, my web application has been experiencing outages due to excessive memory usage. From what I can tell in error logs, it seems the server automatically kills apache processes that consume too much memory. As a result, I upgraded memory from 360 MB to 720 MB as a stop-gap measure. So my question is, how do I go about resolving these outage issues? How do I know if my website's need for more memory is due to poor code or if it's part of the website's natural growth? What's the most efficient way to determine which PHP scripts consume the most memory?

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• How to organize infinite while loop in SQL Server ?

  - by alpav

  I want to use infinite WHILE loop in SQL Server 2005 and use BREAK keyword to exit from it on certain condition. while true does not work, so I have to use while 1=1. Is there a better way to organize infinite loop ? I know that I can use goto, but while 1=1 begin .. end looks better structurally.

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• What programming langauge is this

  - by Hutch

  We're trying to script a cad program, and this is the example for controlling the date in our design slugs, but I don't even know what language it is to know what to do with it. ! LIBEDATE def &d$ &ret$ set &d$ = rstr(`/`,` `,#d$); set &ret$ = word(&d$,2),`/`,word(&d$,1),`/`,subs(word(&d$,3), -2, 2)

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• How to achieve the same effect like the unlock slider in the welcome screen of iPhone OS?

  - by mystify

  I need to do something similar, where an animation highlights the text of a button to show that it must be slided to do something. Just like that unlock thing on the iPhone. How is that done? Is there a tutorial how to achieve this effect?

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• Writing a filter for incoming connections

  - by Kornel Kisielewicz

  I'm using C++/boost::asio under Win7. I'm trying to "sniff" trafic over a given TCP/IP port. Hence, I'd like to listen on that port, receive messages, analyze them, but also immidately allow them to flow further, as if I never intercepted them. I want them to sink into the program that normally listens and connects on that port. Imagine a transparent proxy, but not for HTTP. I'd rather find a code-based solution, but barring that, maybe you would suggest a tool?

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• How to find the most recent associations created between two objects with Rails?

  - by Kevin

  Hi, I have a user model, a movie model and this association in user.rb (I use has_many :through because there are other associations between these two models): has_many :has_seens has_many :movies_seen, :through = :has_seens, :source = :movie I'm trying to get an array of the ten most recent has_seens associations created. For now, the only solution I found is to crawl through all the users, creating an array with every user.has_seens found, then sort the array by has_seen.created_at and only keep the last 10 items… Seems like a heavy operation. Is there a better way? Kevin

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• WCF , The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request.

  - by Pinu

  I am getting this exception when trying to access a wcf web service. [WebException: The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request.] System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetResponse() +5314029 System.ServiceModel.Channels.HttpChannelRequest.WaitForReply(TimeSpan timeout) +54

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• How can I create a footer/toolbar in an iPhone web app?

  - by Hector Scout

  I'm working on a web app and I need to get a div to stick to the bottom of the viewport. Always viewable and always on the bottom of the viewport. There's an example of what I want here: footer. Unfortunately, this doesn't work on the iPhone. I can think of some ways to do this using javascript but I would rather not. Any ideas on how to get this effect on the iPhone using only css?

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