I was having a bit of trouble last night with Atlas.

Here is why.

You will notice on the Atlas site a note saying that the currently available VSI’s for Atlas run only on VS2005 Beta2 right now.

I read that but inferred my own interpretion. My bad. Here’s what you need to know:

Beta2=Beta2

Beta2!=June CTP

Beta2!=July CTP

Beta2!=August CTP

Beta2!=RC Bits distributed at PDC

Hopefully this will save someone else some time.

Posted from BLInk!

I have been trying to do some of the Atlas Hands on Labs.

First, I tried them on my newly set up Vista machine. I had problems getting the file system (aka ASP.NET Development Web Server – so is that called WADWSF now?).  Finally I decided that there is just something WRONG with Vista and the file WADWSF. Even with a simplistic web site that did not involve Atlas, the web server would not consitently start up. I don’t seem to have IIS installed on this box, but Plip has a solution for using IIS on Vista over here (first post, second post).

Next I decided to use my regular laptop (WinXP). Dumb me, I installed the brand spanking new RC bits that I got at PDC, and then discovered that the current Atlas bits only work with Beta 2.

Aargh. So tomorrow morning, I’ll just plug my external USB hard drive in which has Beta2 on a VPC.

I am so hoping to give my user group quick looks at Vista, Atlas and LINQ tomorrow night at the VTdotNET meeting.

Since nullable has been baked into .NET, I had to see if that carried over to ADO.NET. Now I know that datasets’ behavior with Nullable types was so broken that it was removed from the scope of  .NET 2.0, but I wanted to go back and look at my previous tests with dbnull and Nullable types.

Nullable may be “fixed”, but there is still no correlation between them. I know that the fix was for totally different reasons, but I just still had to see.

It is still necessary to test for a dbnull before trying to populate a Nullable<DateTime>, for example.

Any attempts to return date data that is nullable with a datareader.GetDateTime() will give a runtime error. DataReader knows this value is a dbnull, but you will just have to check for yourself and do the little bit of extra work.

nulld Nullable<DateTime>;

‘get some data into a reader and read it

if (myReader.IsDBNull(mycolumn))
{
 nulld=null;
else
 nulld=myReader.GetDateTime(mycolumn);
}

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

With the recent changes to Nullables in v2.0, I wanted to go back to some old tests that had not been very satisfying when I ran them over a year ago.

One was comparing the speed of using a Nullable<T> and testing to see if has a value or not with HasValue to the speed of a just checking for either a null or default value in a system.type.

Here were my results from doing this in July 2004

You will see that a Nullable<Int32> test was much slower than Int32>0 and a Nullable<object> test was slower than object = = null (or IsNull in VB).

Now with the August 05 CTP, things have sped up. One thing to note is that you can’t use Nullable<T> with already nullable values as you could before. So now I am only testing against int.

Using the same 500,000 interations with a Nullable<int>, although the  gap is shrinking, is still somewhat slower. Three tests gave these results

• Nullable<int>.HasValue   vs. int>0
• 4.7668 ms       3.2459 ms
• 5.9834 ms       3.4426 ms
• 4.0203 ms        3.8122 ms

Still, I much prefer Nullable<T> over the other test. What do you test for with dates?

Vermont SQL Server Special Interest Group Next Meeting

When:  6-8pm, Tuesday, September 13th.   ** Different date than usual! 
Where:  Competitive Computing, Inc. Colchester, VT. 
Speaker:   Rushabh Mehta

Rushabh is a business intelligence consultant for Solid Quality Learning and the principal ETL architect for Raymond James Financials. In the past 4 years, Rushabh has been instrumental in the design and development of major data warehouse initiatives for clients in retail and finance. He has architected and developed BI and ETL processes for systems ranging from a What-if analysis system that determine pricing strategies for a retail client; to a multi-terabyte financial decision support system. As the principle ETL architect, Rushabh is currently helping Raymond James Financials shape and achieve their enterprise BI strategy.

Rushabh is also currently serving on the board of directors at PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) and he regularly speaks at conferences on SQL Server and Business Intelligence. He has also authored courseware for SQL Server Integration Services which is delivered through Solid Quality Learning. 
  
Topic:  Highlighting the SQL Server 2005 Relational Engine

SQL Server 2005 provides developers and DBAs with many new enhancements for indexing and performance. In this session we will discuss some of the more important relational storage engine highlights: -Table and index partitioning -Indexes with additional columns included -Correlated datetime statistics -Snapshot Isolation Level -Indexed view enhancements -Persisted computed columns -Disabling indexes. At the end of this session you will have a clear picture of how and when to use these new features to drive development of more highly performant, scalable SQL Server-based applications. A working understanding of SQL Server 2000’s indexing features is recommended but not required.

Meeting Notes:       
                – Pizza for the meeting will be provided, big thanks to Quest Software for sponsoring. Please RSVP to [email protected]
                – If the elevator doesn’t work, please take the stairs to the 4th floor

If you are looking for me at PDC, you can be sure to find me in this session by Pablo Castro!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

A reminder to myself since I kind of missed the note in the VS2005 Documentation that says:

The DebuggerBrowsableAttribute is not supported by Visual Basic in the .NET Framework 2.0

Scott Nonnenberg was kind enough not to point out my mental block.

I somehow looked over it a number of times when looking for a clue about the problem I was having.

I will never remember this – so I’m blogging it.

If you use your middle mouse button to click on the tab of an edit window in VS2005 it will close the window. Caught that as an aside while watching Scott Nonnenberg’s debugging presentation on the TechEd DVD’s.

In fact, right click has also been enhanced.

VS2003 right click on tab:

VS2005 right click

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I noticed in the past few days that these two have been expanded upon in the past months and have been replaced with three pairs of methods, Read/WriteAllText, Read/WriteAllLines and Read/WriteAllBinary.

These are really great – relatively small in the scope of all that is new in VS2005 but SO very useful and not to be missed! [read more…]

[A DevLife post]

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

from Thom Robbins’ blog

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