All posts by Julie

Pilanesberg Park Game Drive

Kate and I went on an incredible 3 hour game drive today with our guide Humbu. We saw so many animals and took gobs of pictures. Kate has blogged some here. Here are a few of mine but I must get focused on my afternoon session – ADO.NET 2.0 & SQL Server 2005 Integration.

These are wildebeest. They are a strange looking animal and are said to have been created with leftover parts of other animals.

These are impalas. We saw them frequently on the drive …

…but not nearly as many as the zillions of zebras we saw. These are a variety that also has a faint brown stripe. The type with only black and white are not in Pilanesberg.

This was our 2nd elephant siting of the morning. The first was in the distance behind the “vacation club” where we were staying. Our eagle eye tour guide spotted them as we were headed to the park. This one, he saw from a distance and drew up a road to show us. Unfortunately, it was a road to a private lodge (“for princes and presidents” as Kate says) and he got yelled at by an employee of the lodge who was also headed up the road. She was very unreasonable and we wondered if her treatment of Humbu was reminiscent of previous relations in South Africa.

ADO.NET – The Happy API

If you are doing an UpdateBatch with ADO.NET 2.0 and do not explicitly set an UpdateBatchSize parameter, this will default at one – meaning that one row will be sent at a time to the server for updating. Whatever other number you set it at is the number of rows that will be sent in a batch and of course you need to consider a variety of factors when choosing this number (such as network latency, how many columns are in the table, etc – bigger is not always better!) This is hardly new info at this point, but there is one other setting – zero. I am listening to Pablo Castro’s ADO.NET 2.0/SQL Server integration talk from TechEd (DAT320) and laughing because he says (this is not a direct quote – I am paraphrasing) “If you set it to zero, there will be no limit to the number of rows….[pause]…which isn’t really very good for performance .. [pause].. I don’t really know why we put it there, but…[you can practially hear him shrug his shoulders] .. we did”. Pablo can totally get away with this… the audience laughs with him and he moves on. Funny how if some other teams said something like this this, they would probably have many detractors. ADO.NET is just a happy API!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Launch 2005 Screencast Contest (Eastern U.S.)

Are you a video jockey? Create a screencast starring Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 or Biztalk Server 2006… and you!

 

I am happy to announce that the East Region Evangelism Team and TechSmith have come together to promote the Launch Tour 2005 with a screencasting contest. To join the funs – and competition – download a free 30 day evaluation of Camtasia Studio. Then record you on onscreen action, your audio, and even your webcam feed.. To show off your rock star personality.

 

Winners will be selected for the following tour cities only: New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Atlanta and Orlando. All winning entries will receive a backstage pass to these events and rock star treatment at the event, as well as various prizes includes a copy of Camtasia Studio.

 

The grand prize winner will be flown to New York City (from within the continental US) to give a demo live, onstage during the during the Steve Guggenheimer keynote!

 

The winning screencasts will be featured on Channel9

 

Ready to go to Rock School?

 

  1. Register for the event that you’ll be attending
  2. Send your AVI screencast submission to Thom Robbins. Entries must be received at least two days prior to each event.

 Official rules, Camtasia download information and additional details can be found here.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Computer Assoc EZ Firewall drives me batty

I have CA EZ Antivirus on my computer. It decided to install the firewall. I don’t want it and am happy with WinXP’s firewall. It’s on my demo machine so I don’t have to deal with it often but it’s stupid. It says “do you want IIS to run” and I select “remember this setting” and click “Allow” which is dim, but still active (doh) and next time I turn on my computer it asks me all of those questions again for a series of apps. SQL Server, svchost and more. The big problem with this is I get sick of it and say “yes yes yes” without looking. I turn it off and turn on Windows Firewall, but when I restart the computer it’s there again. Next step is to just uninstall it. My recommendation is to avoid this program. (Sorry CA) 

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Tim Ewald at Vermont.NET tonight

All I can say is “lucky us”!!

Tim is driving up (or is that over) from New Hampshire to give a fantastic talk I saw/heard him do at TechEd to the Vermont.NET user group tonight.

We are also lucky to have a new convenient venue for our meetings at Vermont Technical College and a sponsor for pizza & soda tonight: Technical Connections.

And just for icing on the cake, I recieved a big box filled with phenomenal O’Reilly press books today!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org