Monthly Archives: November 2005

Jessica Fosler – Microsoft’s strip girl

Connections

Where better to talk about the MenuStrip, ToolStrip and other cool new WinForms controls but in Las Vegas. Jessica Fosler who owns these pieces of VS2005 WinForms is presenting today. Unfortunately, I’m now up in my room prepping my own 4 sessions but definitely enjoyed meeting her this morning in the speaker room. Charles Petzold was there who’s new Programming Windows Forms (for VS2005) book has an entire chapter called “Cruising the Strip” in his book about these tools. Being in Las Vegas had us all giggling over the possibilities of jokes Jessica could make in her presentation. Hopefully, we didn’t corrupt her too much.

Posted from BLInk!

Leaving (for) Las Vegas and far from ready

Connections

Typical – must leave for the airport in 1/2 hour and have been doing client work all morning. Still have to pack (thank goodness I washed all my clothes already). Hopefully my travelling duds aren’t too wrinkly!

I am so looking forward to another DevConnections conference and then a vacation in Zion National Park and Bryce Canyone with my husband!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Vermont ranked as the smartest state in the country

Vermont

I found this article by way of VT blogger, Mark Chadwick.

Vermont ranked as smartest state in the country

October 27, 2005

BARRE, Vt. —Vermont is the brightest state in the country, according to a Kansas publisher.

Morgan Quitno Press ranked Vermont at the top of the list, ahead of Connecticut, which was second, followed by Massachusetts, New Jersey and Maine.

“Vermont shines in many key areas of education,” said Scott Morgan, president of Morgan Quitno Press. “A high percentage of its students excel in reading, writing and math. In addition, schools in Vermont have smaller class sizes and lower pupil-teacher ratios than in most other states.”

The publisher compiled its yearly list of the smartest states measuring 21 factors.

Last year, Vermont ranked third, and second the year before.

Arizona was at the bottom of the list, below Mississippi, New Mexico, Nevada and California.

The publisher also says Vermont is the healthiest state, the second safest and the third most livable.

That was nice to hear after seeing Fortune’s (I think that’s where it was, but I can’t find it) list showing Vermont as the #6 most unfriendly state when it comes to taxes – 6th highest ratio of taxes vs. household income.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

great little demo on hosting winforms controls in asp.net

dotNET

MSDN Nuggets has a bunch of short videos (similar to hte great 10 minute groktalks) on how to do a variety of things in .net.

I caught this one by Mike Taulty that is on hosting windows forms controls in asp.net. What I really liked is the way he demonstrated the code access security issues that you have to be aware of. Rather than saying “don’t do this”, he did do it and showed what happens. Nice.

Follow the above link and look for “Hosting a WinForms Control on an ASP.NET web page”.

One thing that really surprised me was seeing Mike’s email on the beginning of the video. I had no idea he worked for Microsoft!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

VS2005/SQL Server 2005 RTM Query Notification Rules

ADO.NET 2

The rules for using Query Notification have finally settled after evolving through all of the betas and ctps. Here they are copied and pasted directly from the msdn help files:

Applications that use query notification features need to take into account the following special considerations.

Valid Queries

Query notifications only support certain Transact-SQL statements.

First, to support notifications, queries must not contain:

  • Derived tables.

  • Rowset functions.

  • The UNION operator.

  • Subqueries.

  • Outer or self-joins.

  • The TOP clause.

  • The DISTINCT keyword.

  • A COUNT(*) aggregate.

  • AVG, MAX, MIN, STDEV, STDEVP, VAR, or VARP aggregates.

  • User-defined aggregates.

  • A SUM function that references a nullable expression.

  • The full-text predicates CONTAINS or FREETEXT.

  • A COMPUTE or COMPUTE BY clause.

  • Aggregate expressions if GROUP BY is not specified in a select list. If GROUP BY is specified, the select list must contain a COUNT_BIG(*) expression, and cannot specify HAVING, CUBE, or ROLLUP.

  • An INTO clause.

  • Conditions that will preclude results from changing (e.g. WHERE 1=0).

  • FOR BROWSE (or be running with SET NO_BROWSETABLE ON).

  • A READPAST locking hint.

Second, queries must not reference:

  • Temporal tables or table variables.

  • Tables or views from other databases or servers.

  • Any other views or table-valued functions.

  • Any system tables or views.

  • Any nondeterministic function, including ranking and windowing functions.

  • Any server global variables.

  • Any Service Broker queue.

  • Synonyms.

Finally, queries must reference a base table or view.

Rapid Updates

An application that uses Query Notifications must take into consideration cases where a notification occurs immediately. When data is changed on the server, a notification message will be sent to the appropriate Service Broker queue. Applications need to reregister to receive additional notifications. Therefore, if a data set is updated quickly by multiple applications, an application could receive a notification, retrieve the data, and then get another update notification almost immediately after the cache has been refreshed. Applications that use Query Notifications must be written to take this case into account. If an application uses data that is constantly updated, another strategy for caching data may be more appropriate.

Transactions

If multiple modifications are made to a set of data with a registered notification request, and those changes occur within a transaction, only a single notification event will be sent.

Service Account for SQL Server

An application will not receive notifications from an instance of SQL Server that uses the Local System account as the service account.

Posted from BLInk!