Rudolf Henning

For those that use help files or off-line documentation there is an updated version of the SQL server 2005 Books Online. It's a hefty download of over 118MB (for those of us living in da bushes called Africa) but well worth it if you consider using anything of SQL server or even the express version.
Anyway, here is the link
Good luck downloading it. It took me around 5-6 hours.
[Update: People using SQLExpress please also read this about a problem with SQL books on line and SQL management studio CPT]

The man or woman that invented this marvellous "stuff" must be given a Nobel Prize or something. Every now and then I discover another new use for it. Today while drilling holes for a rack I'm installing in my daughter's room I needed something to dampen the noise of the drill since the space was limited and I had to keep it (the drill) right next to my head. In a brain wave I took some prestik and made myself some earplugs. They work wonderfully! The only problem is that they work too well if someone else try to talk to you between drilling sessions.
If you try this 'at home' yourself just be careful not to stick them too far into your ears. You might have some trouble getting them out again. Fortunately I was clever enough not to do that :p. I just had to add that as a disclaimer...

Anyway, thanks Bostik!

Just read an article on iafrica.com about South Africa's bid to host the world's biggest radio telescope. The interesting part is the last few sentences of the article where they mention that the government is committed to provide a super fast optical fiber network that would be 'million' times faster than current broadband speeds.
This would be wonderful for our country but I cannot help to wonder why they (the government) would invest in something like this if half (or at least a major part) of the country still have no or little connectivity. Not to mention the whole *cough* Telkom debacle.
If the private sector can be allowed to benefit from this new network they can also help contributing to the economy which will help everybody. Just imagine we can get a proper broadband network that can compete with the outside world. It would make a couple of people (like yours truly) very happy.

I hope at least we get the bid. For our scientists sake as well as ours.

This year has almost saw its ... ok its almost over.

It was a year with mixed results. There were high points and looow points. I'll leave the low points for some other day. So what was "good" this year?
Visual Studio 2005 (aka Whidbey) was released...eventually! With it came SQL 2005 as well. Just too bad about BizTalk...
I visited the US of A for the first time in my life. Cool place. Wouldn't mind visiting it again but don't think I would want to stay there - no family and South Africa braai, etc.
Tech-Ed - enough said.
Dotnet Juniors got started. At least some people found it useful. Thanks Sacha for sticking to the end.
We had three engagements this year for Sadev members. Jannie, David (Mob54) and Deon (Slain). Hope the weddings develop as good as you can code! ;)
Ruari joined Microsoft. Good for him!
Ok, I'll have to think about the rest. As for 2006 there are a couple of things to look forward to. Vista (perhaps), BizTalk(perhaps), dotnet Juniors 2 with some more practical stuff. More LAN's - I hope. Anything more that zero would be ok.

Well, have a good 2006 and forget the presents, just send money!

A few weeks ago I ordered a batch of free cd's from Ubuntu and I received it yesterday. Wow, a whole batch of cd's free plus it openly states "Ubuntu is Software Libre. You are legally entitled and encouraged to copy, share and redistribute this CD for yourself and your friend. Share the spirit of Ubuntu".
Now that is something you won't get from Microsoft, the RIAA and the rest of the copy protection fanatics out there!

See http://shipit.ubuntu.com for more details and order your own!

The batch comes with 32bit and 64bit version plus each has a "Live" and "install" cd.

Let the fun begins!

Every now and then on a regular basis you do something or struggle with something that you just cannot solve and no matter how hard you try, it just don't want to work. Then someone suggests something very simple and all of a sudden it all starts to work! You feel as little as a mouse or want to stick your head into the nearest hole...
Well, I just had one of 'those' moments with a BizTalk adapter that I was testing. We currently are investigating using a pop3 adapter to read mail and have it processed by BizTalk. I searched the net and came across the 'BizTalkBill POP3 Adapter' hosted on gotdotnet. Right from the installation we were getting errors that the adapter cannot 'read' the messages. We tried various things and I contacted Bill Chesnut the creator of the adapter who was very helpful in trying to solve this problem. After several days and lots of email and attempts to tweak this or that he made a little suggestion to try and use the BizTalk deployment wizard to import one of the adapter's assemblies (pop3.dll). Boom! There it started working, and I feel like kicking myself for not thinking about it sooner. It is obvious that somehow the adapter or BizTalk could not reference the specific assembly at run time and gave the 'false' error message. Unfortunately its very difficult to debug these kind of things and no developer can think about all possible combinations of things that can break your system.
I must just re-iterate that we had great support from Bill Chesnut and anyone that needs good support from a BizTalk adapter (pop3 in this case) can make use of his work! Thanks Bill!

I posted a link on Sadev about an article I discovered on the net (ironically from a computer hardware related site) in which they tell about Microsoft planning to open 30 new R & D centers in '3rd world' type countries. South Africa was conveniently or deliberately left out. It made me start thinking how much do we really do (developers and Microsoft employees of this country) to encourage research into new development and other markets.
The government is pretty useless to expect pushing such an endeavor so someone else must do it. Microsoft is already doing a lot - mostly helping themselves [read our money] by increasing their revenue but at least they are busy with something.
The average business in this country is finding it hard to innovate, especially on the software arena - so it seems. Our big companies don't invest in technology heavily that could benefit the man on the street, only stuff that will increase their profit margins. I suppose there is little incentive to do otherwise since the government won't help them in turn. Then there is the whole Telkom 'thing' so the IT budget is heavily spent on line rentals etc...

http://www.sadeveloper.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=65587

Just imagine telecommunications being cheap in this country (a wild dream I know). Perhaps then we might be allowed to work partially from home saving on fuel and pollution and hospital bills for all the high blood pressures being stuck in traffic etc, etc, etc. Ok so that is a super wild dream...

Back to the original story. Imagine the educational and R& D 'industries' can improve, this country might actually stand a chance to compete with the outside world. Microsoft could [if they wanted] open such centers here for each big city - heck, we only have about 4 or 5 of them! They and us could all benefit from this on the long run.

So please MS, considder this to help this country that has a lot of potential.

I logged a suggestion with MSDN product feedback center about the lack of Installer procjets in the Express versions. However, the priority of them attending to suggestions/requests depends on other people visiting and requesting the same issue.
If you think you also would like to have this feature for the Express versions then please visit this 'suggestion' entry. If not then don't - there, I gave you a choice... :p

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=fb18743a-d497-4a0e-a064-91afe49a6674

Thanks to Ruari we can give comments and suggestions of features we would like to be added/changed in future or updated versions of Visual Studio. Have a peek at:

http://www.sadeveloper.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=65456


Speak up now or forever hold your... well, just go and say how you like it or not - and why.

It feels like yesterday when the year got started and there was still a whole year to look forward to. Now, there is little less than a month left of it. So many things happened but I had so many more ideas and plans for things that I wanted to achieve. I guess now they'll have to shift over for a next year.
At the beginning of the year I had ambitious ideas about my sci-fi story universe. While the plan is still to get to it I have not done anything further about it and it does not seem that it will happen soon.

Otherwise I had plans to start a learning program for junior guys that wanted to start with .Net. This did get underway and we had a couple of good sessions. Hopefully we can build on it next year.

Then there is SaDev. I must confess that I did not have the same amount of time or energy this year to push it like it should be. On a personal level things got a bit hectic in the personal life and it took priority over any other external social events.

The good things for this year? Well, I went to PDC in Los Angeles, Hollywood! There was Tech Ed. Visual Studio and SQL 2005 was launched… (eventually). I got my laptop I wanted for so long. Got my first (and only so far) AMD64. Three of our heros fell (referring to the newly engaged, Jannie, David and Deon).

And the negative things? Perhaps its better that I don’t start mentioning these… or at least all of them. My car blew a top cylinder gasket… again. This time fortunately it did not cost me an entire new engine. We did not have a sadev LAN this year (yes, shame on us all).

So what is the conclusion for this year? It was a mixed year with good and bad. There was some really down times for me personally but at least some very exciting up ones as well.

So what is up for next year? I still want to get to my story universe idea – if time permits. The .Net juniors will come back for a season II. The idea is to extend it and make it a bit more practical. There must at least be one LAN! (Even if I have to blackmail some people to get it started).

Enjoy the (remainder) of this year and don’t go overdoing it (too much that is…)