- Posted by reggie on November 19, 2008
I am almost certain they won’t but Microsoft should seriously consider how they will make Windows 7 available to the public when it is released next year. Ever since Vista came out there has been no end to the complaining that there were not enough extras available for Vista Ultimate. They say it was not worth the cost and I agree.
So here is what Microsoft should do. Eliminate all versions of Windows 7 but one. No ultimate edition, or basic edition, or primary basic edition, or grandma’s pro edition. Just one. Very simple. Windows 7.
Then, considering that almost all of the units sold come from new computers, give a free upgrade to Windows 7 to all who purchased Vista Ultimate sort of as a final Vista Ultimate extra.
Finally, sell the Windows 7 upgrade for $99 and the full package for $189 at retail shops.
This is so obvious that a child could figure it out. Which is why I have no hope that Microsoft will see it.
- Posted by reggie on November 12, 2008
MySQL Connector/Net 5.2.4, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This release is of GA quality and is suitable for use in production environments. We strongly urge you to review the change log that is shipped with the product for a thorough review of the changes.
We have a ton of fixes in this release so please review the changelog and see if your favorite bug has been fixed. Version 5.2.4 works with all versions of MySQL including MySQL-4.1, MySQL-5.0, MySQL-5.1, and the MySQL-6.0 beta.
It is now available in source and binary form from [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/5.2.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)
Changes since 5.2.3
- fixed web providers autogenerateschema option where it would fail if no schema is present at all (bug #39072)
- backported fix for lingering problem related to bug #37239. If two columns had the same name but different case then an exception would be thrown.
- fixed stored procedure parameter parsing when used inside server explorer. (bug #39252)
- fixed time data type so that negative values are handled properly (bug #39275)
- added runtime check for the mono platform to our Membership provider. The mono runtime as of 1.9.1 did not support the methods needed for hashed passwords (bug #38895)
- fixed problem where negative time values with a zero hour would return as positive values (bug #39294)
- fixed problem where using a stored procedure with parameters with a table adapter was no longer working after our parameter schema changes (bug #39252)
- fixed problem with profile provider where INSERT .. ON DUPLICATE UPDATE syntax would not work correctly with some older server versions (bug #39330)
- Defaulting max allowed packet to 1024 to account for the possible case where the value doesn't come in as a server variable
- fixed bug #39728 by making MySqlConnectionStringBuilder.GetConnectionString an internal method. It should not have been publicly available anyway. It is used internally by the MySqlConnection.ConnectionString property
- implemented Disposable pattern on MySqlTransaction class so including one in a using statement and then not calling commit will cause a rollback when the using exits (bug #39817)
- fixed MySqlScript object so that it handles scripts with user variables
- fixed bug where specifying 'functions return string=yes' would cause strings to be returned using the 'binary' charset which would not properly render some characters. Now the connection character set is used. (bug #40076)
- fixed problem that caused in use connection strings to be modified when a pooled connection timed out and was cancelled. (bug #40091)
- fixed problem where using respect binary flags would not use the connection char set and therefore return strings with a bad encoding.
- fixed bug where provider was attempting to use the new parameters I_S view on servers that didn't have it (bug #40382)
- fixed problem where CharSetMap.GetDefaultCollation and CharSetMap.GetMaxLengths might have a thread sync issue on high load systems. They were not locking the static collections there were initializing. (bug #40231)
- added GetSByte to the reader for returning tinyint columns (bug #40571)
Thanks for using MySQL Connector/Net!
- Posted by reggie on November 6, 2008
This past Tuesday I was doing more than just voting. I was giving a live webinar on using MySQL with the Entity Framework. We had a terrific time (demo machine crash included!) and had a great turnout. I have been informed that we set records for most number of registrations and attendees. I’m truly honored and hope that at least some of you got something out of it.
I’ve had a lot of people ask me for the materials from the session so I’ve made them available from my personal server. You can get the slides, sample projects, and db script here. The webinar was also recorded and will appear on this page eventually.
Thanks again to all who attended. I’m hoping to give an expanded version of this session at our users conference in April. I hope to see some of you there!
- Posted by reggie on November 2, 2008
So last night my family and I go to watch some scary movies that had been recorded and find out that our media center computer is not working. So like a dutiful geekdad, I march into the office to see what is wrong. I remote into the media center with no trouble but no matter what I try the 360 just won't connect to it. Running the network tuner it reports poor network performance, way below the 'Acceptable for TV' line. Hmm. So I spend the next hour running wires from various ports around the house, switching ports on the switch in the media cabinet, everything I could think of. Nothing.
I never really paid much attention to the activation prompt that it was giving me when I remoted into it. Surely MS would not be that stupid. Surely.
So this morning I tried to connect to a media center computer I had running in a virtual machine (yeah VirtualBox) and it worked without a hitch. So I remote back into the non-working media center computer and run through the activation process. Bingo. 360 now connects perfectly and the network tuning wizard shows the exact same network as maxed out on quality.
Lesson learned? Instead of just disabling Media center functionality and just telling you that until you activate it won't work, MS apparently just cripples it so that it doesn't work but doesn't tell you what is wrong. Absolutely ridiculous.
- Posted by reggie on October 30, 2008
Microsoft has been taking some pretty good body blows from Apple over the past couple of years. These have primarily been in the form of the PC/Mac ads and are not entirely undeserved. Vista is a pretty good product but pretty good is clearly not good enough. Well, Microsoft just landed a right hook to the jaw of OS/X. It’s on now!
It’s really quite incredible how much work Microsoft has done on Windows during the lifetime of Apple OS/X. OS/X 10.0 was released in 2001, the same year Windows XP was released. For the most part OS/X has not changed since then. Sure, you have new features like Time Machine but the user experience has really not changed much and neither have most of the features. The same is not true for Windows. In that same timeframe Microsoft has put out major service packs for XP, created a new server product named Windows Server 2003, and then created the Vista line of products (Vista, Windows Server 2008, etc). Vista was supposed to be a moon shot but instead Microsoft got so caught up in completely rebuilding the rocket that it never really got off the pad. With the shiny new Vista rocket sitting idle on the pad it wasn’t too hard for OS/X to look good and Apple to gain some market share.
And then in comes Steven Sinofsky to lead the Windows guys. Now I’m not going to lay all the credit on him. I’m sure Jim Allchin deserves a lot of credit for building a solid foundation in Vista but it’s clear that the changes in development models that Sinofsky brought over from the Office team have made a huge difference not only in developer morale but in product quality. I have yet to read any reviews of the Windows 7 pre-beta that didn’t describe it as fast, stable, and “what Vista should have been”.
So what are some of the features or enhancements in 7 that are going to make the difference? I’m glad you asked. Here are the features that I think will make 7 the must have OS for 2009. This is not nearly a complete list of features however.
Speed, speed, and more speed. The Windows team has spent a lot of time optimizing the product, reducing it’s memory footprint, and speeding up boot time. There is evidence that 7 runs great on netbooks, unlike Vista. Also, some early reviews have reported an install time of 15 minutes compared to Vista’s 45 minutes on the same hardware. That same review showed 7 booting is much lower time than Vista. Apparently resume is nearly instantaneous and, unlike OS/X, the network is available immediately upon resume.
Device Stage. This feature is actually not getting a lot of attention but I think it will be the killer feature of 7. In essence it is area where device manufacturers can plug in to 7 and display a management page for their particular device. So a user could plug in a cell phone, see it appear in device stage, and then click on it to bring up the manufacturers UI for that device. This UI could contain links to online manuals, launchers for SMS message reading, sync settings, whatever. This is device specific. A printer could show ink tank levels, provide UI for maintenance, a button for ordering supplies, etc. This is huge. Count on it.
HomeGroups. This is networking except easier. This only works with Windows 7 pcs but when multiple Windows 7 computers are put on a single network they will connect to form a HomeGroup and then allow seamless sharing of the content on each computer with the others. You get a PIN code for the home group so that when a visitor comes over with her laptop running 7 she is prompted to join the home group as soon as she gets on the network. Enter the PIN code and she can share any of the media that you have made publicly available and print to any printers (use any device for that matter) that are publicly available without any concern or question about which computer she is connecting to. It’s all seamless. Just that way it should be.
New Windows Taskbar and Jumplists. The new task bar has many new features like tab previewing, reordering, blah, blah, blah. But the coolest new feature is called jumplists. These are popup menus that appear when you click on the app icon. These are customizable by the application and it will save clicks. Want to edit the Word doc you were working on last night. Just click on the word icon and the most recently edited files list appears in the jumplist. Pick your doc and it opens right up. Clicks saved!
Touch support. It’s all about the touch these days. From IPhones to G1s, it’s all about touch. And Windows 7 is ready to be touched. oh baby. Pair Windows 7 with any of the already shipping touch screen computers like the HP TouchSmart and you have a fully touch enabled system. You can drag, flick, and stroke your away around the desktop. Hmm, that sounds just creepy now. Just trust me, it’s cool. You’ll love it.
With the solid Vista foundation and the excellent feature work in 7, this is the Windows you have been waiting for. Dell and other companies are starting to make laptops that really compete with Apple. Dell and HP both have lappies that have battery lives of at least 19 hours (wow!) and Dell is starting to offer backlit keyboards on it’s computers. OS/X is a nice operating system but with 7 coming at breakneck speed, nice is not going to be enough. Oh yeah, it’s on now.
- Posted by reggie on October 10, 2008
In my role with Sun I do quite a bit with the Visual Studio SDK. I develop our ADO.NET provider and the integration code that allows the provider to work inside of Visual Studio. We support VS 2005 and 2008 with a single binary and, up until now, I’ve used the VS 2005 SDK. But I’ve had this nagging feeling that I should be able to use the 2008 SDK and the new VSCT format for producing the CTO files.
After some research I discovered that VS 2008 ships with some binding redirects that allows it to use binaries built with the 2005 SDK. Of course you can always count on Microsoft to make this as hard as possible. They could keep in mind that out here in the real world we have to support older VS versions and ship the SDK with all necessary tools and assemblies. But this is Microsoft we are talking about so the regpkg tool that ships with the SDK and helps with assembly registration is tightly bound to the SDK version.
But the stupidity doesn’t end there. With some hacking you can get around the regpkg issue (and you can’t ship that tool anyway) but they don’t provide attributes to handle all the registration tasks that are necessary. Need to register your assembly as a DDEX data provider? Out of luck. Need to specify the technology parameter so your DDEX provider works with the proper wizards? Out of luck. So, I don’t really give a flip about regpkg and the attributes.
With all that said, I tested building an integration project with the 2008 SDK after making the following changes. The resources worked great originating as VSCT files.
1: <RegisterOutputPackage>false</RegisterOutputPackage>
2: <RegisterWithCodebase>true</RegisterWithCodebase>
3: <!-- Make sure we are 2005 compatible, and don't rely on RegPkg.exe
4: of VS2008 which uses Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.9.0 -->
5: <UseVS2005MPF>true</UseVS2005MPF>
6: <!-- Don't try to run as a normal user (RANA),
7: create experimental hive in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -->
8: <RegisterWithRanu>false</RegisterWithRanu>
- Posted by reggie on September 26, 2008
I don’t know what the hell happened but I still have my blog posts. Whew! I recently moved my blog from a cheap GoDaddy account to my Windows Home Server. I consider this entirely your fault, dear reader, as if I had more readers then I would feel compelled to host it externally with a fatter pipe. But I digress… :)
In any case, while was otherwise occupied (attending the Sun DBTG developers conference in Riga, Latvia) something happened to my server and I came home to my files not working. They were there but any attempt to open them would give some obscure error about the system not being able to access it. Clearly this had something to do with the “special” load balancing driver that WHS uses. In any case it appeared my music and blog was toast.
Earlier today I learned that WHS maintains another link to your shared folders. I enabled viewing the protected folders and saw a folder named “DE” on c:\. Peeking there shows the same shared folder directory structure only these work! Clearly these are sym links as c:\ is only as 20 gig partition but it was showing nearly 80 gig of data in this folder. I quickly copied these off to a new machine and rebuilt my WHS server. Blog restored!
Lesson learned? Get a second hard drive in your WHS machine so the folder duplication junk can do its thing!
- Posted by reggie on August 26, 2008
Like most Windows devs I really like the Sysinternals family of products. So when I caught wind this morning of a new product called Desktops that creates a virtual workspace of up to 4 desktops I just knew it was the product I was looking for. Well, it sort of is.
You can't ask for an easier installation. Unzip it and drop it on a folder and run it. In the dialog that appears you can select whether to run it at startup. Here's a shot of that dialog.
It has a nice selection of options to select which desktop you are using but sadly it doesn't support the most important one -- the arrow keys! Someone who is using virtual desktop software is enough of a power user that they will want to switch desktops on-the-fly without looking at the keyboard. Sure I can whack a number key without looking but the T-shape arrow keypad just fits with the metaphor a bit better. A simple Ctrl+Shift+Arrow would do the trick.
The other problem is the speed. It's a bit slow and has no nice swipes or transitions but it is free software so I'm really not griping about that too much.
All in all a welcome bit of software. Thanks Mark!
- Posted by reggie on August 21, 2008
MySQL Connector/Net 5.1.7 a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This is a minor release involving mainly bug fixes.
Version 5.1.7 works with all versions of MySQL including MySQL-4.1, MySQL-5.0, MySQL-5.1 beta or the MySQL-6.0 beta releases.
It is now available in source and binary form from [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/5.1.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)
IMPORTANT
Unless a major, data-loss type bug is found, we expect this to be the last release of the 5.1 product. We encourage all new work to use the newly released 5.2 product
Bugs Fixed
- Fixed problem with DDEX provider that could sometimes prevent table altering when working with 4.1 servers (bug #30603)
- Fixed problem with pooling code where connections pooled from the pool were added twice to the in use pool. This would cause a semaphore full exception when an attempt is made to release them back to the pool (bug #36688)
- Reversed order of Datetime and DateTime enums for MySqlDbType so that VB users won't get autocorrection to Datetime (bug #37406)
- Uncommented access denied error enumeration value (bug #37398)
- Improved documentation concerning autoincrement columns and the DataColumn class (bug #37350)
- Fixed problem where executing a command that results in a fatal exception would not close the connection. (bug #37991)
- Fixed problem where executing a command with a null connection object would result in a null reference exception instead of an InvalidOp (bug #38276)
Enjoy and thanks for the support!
Reggie
- Posted by reggie on August 18, 2008
MySQL Connector/Net 5.2.3, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This release is of GA quality and is suitable for use in production environments. We strongly urge you to review the change log that is shipped with the product for a thorough review of the changes.
Version 5.2.3 works with all versions of MySQL including MySQL-4.1, MySQL-5.0, MySQL-5.1 beta or the MySQL-6.0 Falcon "Preview".
It is now available in source and binary form from [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/5.2.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)
Changes since 5.2.2
- Increased the speed of MySqlDataReader.GetOrdinal dramatically by using a couple of hashes for lookups
- Fixed problem where some tables that support the web providers used the latin1 character set instead of the database default. (bug #36444)
- Changed how the procedure schema collection is retrieved. If 'use procedure bodies=true' then we select on the mysql.proc table directly as this is up to 50x faster than our current IS implementation. If 'use procedure bodies=false', then the IS collection is queried. (bug #36694)
- Fixed problem with our GetOrdinal speedup where we would attempt to add an already existing key to a hash when a resultset had more than 1 column with the same name. (bug #37239)
- small fix to how we were allowing in/out and out parameters to slide through parameter serialization. Before we were setting the AllowUserVariables connection setting but that had the unfortunate side effect of setting the value for all connections that shared that connection string. This way we isolate it just to our particular command. This may fix bug #37104
- Fixed documentation surrounding use of ? vs @ for parameters (bug #37349)
- Reduced network traffic for the normal case where the web provider schema is up to date (bug #37469)
- Improved error reporting when a timeout occurs. It no longer uses a message like 'reading from stream failed'. (bug #38119)
- fixed problem where adding a non-existent user to a role would not auto-create the user record (bug #38243)
- moved string escaping routine from the MySqlString class to the MySqlHelper class and made it public and static. (bug #36205)
- Fixed problem where column metadata was not being read with the correct character set (bug #38721)
- Fixed problem where the uninstall was not cleaning up the state files (bug #38534)
- Added 'Functions Return String' connection string option
- Several other fixes merged in from 5.0 and 5.1