November 2004 - Posts
Note that we're having our next SADeveloper session on Thursday evening, 25th November. Stuart is going to give us more insight to SQL Reporting Services.
Topic: SQL Reporting Services - Whiteboard Session
Date: Thursday, 25 November
Time: 17h45 for 18h00
Venue: CS Holdings, Derby Downs, Westville
Snacks and drinks provided - now that's motivation to go! :)
I've had to compare IL generated by the C# compiler to that of the VB.NET compiler recently. To do so most efficiently from Visual Studio, I added ildasm.exe and ilasm.exe to Visual Studio's list of External Tools. It makes flipping back and forth from source-code to IL a breeze.
I set it up ILASM as follows:
The default path for ilasm is C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\ilasm.exe. I like using the output window to view IL assembler-results (warnings and errors!). My ILDASM setup looks like this:
My path to ILDASM is D:\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\SDK\v1.1\Bin\ildasm.exe. This enables you to view the assembly resulting from the project you're currently working on.
I'm about to play Quake II on my iMate - how cool is that?! Much better than the BackGammon I've had to play till now...
The game data file (.PAK file, +/-8Mb) is necessary to play.
Found this little RSS aggregator for the Pocket PC yesterday - it's the only RSS aggragator for this platform as far as I can tell.
...has just started blogging! Subscribed.
Oh, Damian works with me. He's particularly interested in database technologies; expect some SQL Server related knowledge from him ;o)
Microsoft launched the BETA version of their new MSN search engine yesterday - it can be found over at http://beta.search.msn.com. The full-fledged version will, according to rumours, only launch around June 2005.
This version has 5 billion pages cached (Google has 8 billion), which is impressive for a beta site. I'm impressed with the results, but still prefer the Google for now... Search ads this year have been a US$2.7 billion industry - worthwhile to get a marketshare!
I got myself an i-mate Pocket PC a while ago. (It sounds terribly Australian!) I'm pretty impressed overall, except with its bluetooth implementation - it seems that all I can use bluetooth for is to connect to a headset! No interaction with other bluetooth devices... I was happy to learn from Club i-mate that there is a ROM upgrade available, which includes:
- Improved Battery Life
- Improved MMS client
- Headset Bluetooth bonding improvements
- Bluetooth throughput improvements
- Latest Service Pack 2 from Microsoft
- Service codes added to Speed Dials
- Call Waiting sound
- Latest Radio version
No bluetooth enhancements, other than the headset connectivity... bummer! Be warned: the upgrade will erase everything from your ROM and RAM, so make sure to backup before doing the upgrade, which took me around two hours. The only visible improvement after the upgrade was that my Windows build number has increased (!)
[UPDATE]: The upgrade has improved bluetooth capability, and I can indeed send / receive files to / from other bluetooth devices properly.
A few nerds will be getting together on 18th November, 19:00, at the News Cafe' at Gateway for some general nerd talk. See you there, fellow nerds from Natal!!!
The team at Microsoft working on the Enterprise Library has finally reached zero bug bounce. The “Enterprise Library” is an aggregation of some of the “Application Blocks” released by Microsoft before, many of them enhanced and some radically changed. The following will be part of the EL, according to Scott Densmore:
· Configuration
· Security
o Profile
o Roles
o Authorization
o Authentication
· Logging & Instrumentation (EIF)
· Caching
· Exception Handling
· Data Access
The EL Workspace can be found here.
What do you do when you're in my situation? I'm on a project where the architecture reminds me of a QBasic program, but it's an enterprise-wide implementation. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code, with UML diagrams that depicts a system totally different from the actual code.... We are so time-pressed to deliver extra functionality on this system that we have no time to change the architecture! At night I have gorgeous dreams of carribean islands, surfing and OO... all of them are a distant memory at the moment...
What to do when you have to write code, every day, that you dispise?! I need a holiday...