Rants Tagged with “.NET”
Thanks to Bill Booth via the Windows Off Topic Mailing List, I was concerned that the DTC was being used for intra-database transactions with SQL Server 2000. I was looking at timing and using System.Transactions with SQL 2000 is through the roof slower than using traditional client-side transactions. Interestingly SQL 2005 doesn't have this limitation. Lazar Florin has a great blog post that explains what is happening here (found here).
Short story is that SQL 2000 can't automatically use the Lightweight Transaction Coordinator inside of System.Transactions (SQL 2005 has promotable transactions and can use it fine). Luckily it is not too hard to make SQL 2000 behave (as seen in Lazar's blog entry). Great find Bill!
As some of you know I lost the screen on my main laptop (HP ZD8000, a lovely machine at 13 lbs) so I sent it into support where they are going to fix it but take 2 weeks to do it. I took over my old laptop from my dear Tricia to try and make it work for a while.
To simplify her world, the laptop only had XP Home on it. After getting the 3,000 things installed I needed to in order to work on my current project I am going to have to upgrade it to Professional. The problem? ASP.NET 2.0.
I am working on a project using the VS web server (not IIS would would have been an obvious Professional requirement). But I started to get the dreaded "Unable to attach. Binding Invalid Handle" error when trying to debug. Digging deeper it seems that it needs the VS Remote Debugger to work to debug in the VS Web Server (don't ask me why...it *just* does).
Remote Debugger was running, so what was wrong I wondered? I couldn't even attach to other processes with a similarly cryptic error:
"Unable to connect to the Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor name 'XXXX'. The binding handle is invalid."
So I dug in the debugger (Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\ide\Remote Debugger\x86\msvsmon.exe) and ran it manually (after stopping the service). It complained:
"Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor will not be able to debug applicaitons because the 'Network access: Sharing and security model for local accounts' local security option is set to 'Guest only - local users authenticate as Guest'. This can be configured with the 'Local Security Settings' administration tool."
Great error message...a solution right? Well, um...nope. Local Security Settings is a tool that only works with XP Professional. So I give up. I am going to do the upgrade to professional and hope I don't hose the machine and have to start all over.
Wish me luck...
I spent my first couple of hours with Cider this evening. Cider is the VS 2005 designer for
XAML and
WPF applications. I have to say, most of the feel was very much like traditional WinForms development. I am very impressed. I've been looking at
XAML so long it was kinda strange being able to create it with drag-n-drop. I think the hardest thing for people to get used to is the container support. But many many apps will end up just using the Grid, but I hope to get people to look at the other containers more as they have a lot of usefulness in the long run.
This is freaking huge in my opinion. It seems that all the fuss about how hard ASP.NET 2.0 has made it for many of us has gotten through to the team (yeah!). You can download the Preview here:
http://webproject.scottgu.com/
I am currently doing a bunch of evaluations on OR Mappers, Code Gen and Business Object Frameworks for my new book. If anyone knows about anything great that might go unnoticed, please drop a comment or send me an email!
Thanks!
According to this post (this highlights my belief that MS is discouraging DataSets enough though they are using them everywhere (e.g. inside DataSources)). SInce Typed DataSets don't work out of the box with ObjectDataSources, we are left with three uncomfortable solutions:
- Ditch them and write Business Objects even in small apps
- Use SqlDataSources and don't allow NULL's in any of our columns (see my previous rant).
- Write a wrapper class around every DataTable (or perhaps in the partial class) to allow the Object DataSource to work with it.
The Partial Class solution may be easiest, but it is still some magical mix of parameters that will make it appear in the ObjectDataSource configuration dialog. I hope to have a better solution soon for this, but don't count on it.
I've been working on a problem for a client's project. We are doing pretty raw RAD design for a small intranet project so I thought, hey let's just do SqlDataSources to get the pages up and running fast. This works fine *if* we don't want any concurrency.
Let me repeat that, this works fine *if* we do not want concurrency.
The problem lies in the fact that we have columns that are null-able (pretty common in schema design). The concurrency that is generated by ASP.NET 2.0's SqlDataSource does not do the same concurrency (e.g. WHILE foo = @foo OR (foo is null and @foo is null)) that Typed DataSets and CommandBuilders have done for several years.
My guess is that this is another example of how fractured the data teams in Microsoft are. One team does DataSets, which another does Typed DataSets, and if I am correct, yet another does the DataSource work.
Arg!
Michael Earls' blog has a quick 411 on the new Web Project Beta from Microsoft that includes support for pre-building all the assemblies into a single assembly for deployment. Check it out if you're doing anything with
ASP.NET 2.0.
I've added a couple of new features (thanks to Chris Sells for QA'ing it for me):
- You can now click on your name in the logon header (if you've registered) to edit details about your account and change/reset your password.
- If you have registered, I automatically pre-populate the Add Comments Name/Website for you.
Welcome to the new version of The ADO Guy. Most of the changes are under the covers, but there are a few things to note:
- No more collapsable sections (some of you didn't like them and I agreed).
- Registration is now required to ask questions. I've gotten a lot of abuse from my open way to submit questions. I am sorry to have to resort to this, but I am hoping this will help the process not hurt it. User information will only be used for questions and communication about them.
- Some visual changes, but not many.
Please let me know what you like and don't like. A couple of things aren't working yet:
- Searching quesitons is disabled for now. It'll return soon.
- The Book Owners area is disabled. This will return very very soon.
UPDATE: Comments aren't working...Yet.
