The recent discussions about Sharepoint have piqued my interest (since I have been struggling with it for a few weeks) but not distracted me from my goal yet! Amanda Murphy, however has a LOT to say on the topic. She has a lot of experience with Sharepoint and her company, InfoTech Canada, dpes a large amount of Sharepoint work. I would definitely recommend reading this post of hers.
This bit me (again) today. It had been so long since the last time that I had to google for help.
Problem: Select colA, colB, colC from tableA UNION Select colA, colB, colC from tableB when one of the columns is an ntext will result in this confusing error:
“The text, ntext, or image data type cannot be selected as DISTINCT.”
Thanks to this Wrox forum thread, I got a quick lesson of why I get an error regarding a clause that I’m not even using (DISTINCT) and a reminder to use UNION ALL instead of just UNION.
In case that thread ever disappears I will paste the key info from Jeff Mason.
The UNION operator by default eliminates duplicate rows from the resultset. The duplicate eliminating operation is similar to a SELECT DISTINCT. You can’t use SELECT DISTINCT on a column that is text type.
Try UNION ALL which will not remove duplicates, or remove the text column(s).
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Oh, more lost hours in admin hell. Here’s some pointers if you are upgrading your web server to SP1.
– Remember the firewall problems when moving XP to SP2. You will have them here!! <g> Pay attention to what ports are opened up.
This article is a good reminder of that wiht a section on what applications to allow through the firewall on the remote server
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;833977#27
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In addition to the free ASP.NET online learning, there is VS2005 E-Learning (free for four months) and SQL Server 2005 e-Learning, also free for 4 months.
The launch page for all of this stuff is at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/learning/
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My 2 year contract was ending with Verizon. They have called me 3 times now to renew a contract and see if I’d like to pick a new phone – either free for heavily discounted. Each time they have called I have looked at the phones while on the phone with them and couldn’t make a quick and informed decision. I know I would like a camera phone with Blue Tooth. Their “free” phones don’t have blue tooth. I can get one with bluetooth for $100, but then I think – geeze, maybe I should just fork it over and get a BlackBerry or better yet, a smartphone, but they don’t have those in their promotion. I finally just said forget a new phone – just renew my contract. So now I continue with my plain old phone. I cannot justify $500 for a phone. I have a pocket pc and I have a phone. Yes I want to smoosh them together and have just ONE device (and have it also be an MP3 player that I can listen to in my car). It was easier just to make NO decision, than to have to choose. So welcome to the life of a Libra!
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Loren is a developer who definitely is a “big brain” when it comes to thinking about WHAT we can do with ink, not just how to use it.
I can’t point to this post of his without quoting him: I’ve heard it said many times: “I’m a developer. I type code. Why do I need a Tablet PC or even ink?”
Check out what he has done (well, is still working out) in regards to inking notes into your IDE code or while debugging. Very cool!
Don Box reports that the first Indigo book is on the shelves. He refers to author David Pallman as an “indigette”. 🙂
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To appease the masses (okay it was just Dave Burke’s loud whining), Kathleen will talk a bit about Code Gen at our VTdotNET meeting on Monday night. Her regularly schedule presentation, Tracing in VS2003 and VS2005 is a 90 minute talk. So we will take a break after that talk (app. 8:15 for the break) do our raffles, etc, then Kathleen will spend 1/2 hour talking about some high level CodeGen concepts and also how Generics in VS2005 is going to have an incredible impact on Code Generation. We will probably continue the conversation at a local pub in downtown Burlington.
So check the website – which I will be modifying shortly – for the new schedule.
We have a box of goodies from APress – lots of books (including Kathleen’s Code Generation in Microsoft.NET book), t-shirts and more and I’ll also be raffling off a copy of Infragistics NetAdvantage!
Remember that we have our .NET Newbie session (OOP: Inheritance & Polymorphism in .NET) at 5:30.
Thanks to INETA for bringing Kathleen our way.
She heads up to Montreal to do a full 2 hour Code Gen talk at GUVSM on Tuesday night (in English :-)).
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