So tonight at about 8pm I sit down on the couch with a beer when I hear a knock at the door. When I answer it there two ladies and a gent all smartly dressed in suits. The woman asks me to confirm my name and address as shown on her clipboard she then starts a vauge diatribe about how I could save money on my energy bills. At no point did she identify that she was from nPower. I learnt this from looking at the logo on her Id badge.

The lady's sales pitch continued for about a minute until I twigged what was going on. I asked her straight out "Are you offering to change my provider?" she seemed disinclined to answer the question so I asked it again. She said yes to which I replied I am not interested in changing my provider. She asked if it was due to the hassle, I said no I just do not want to change. That was the end of it.

What annoyed me was the underhand way in which the salespeople misleadingly explained their presence on my doorstep. If they had identified themselves as N-Power and offered to quote me a price for supplying fuel I would have given them a chance. I like the next person would always rather pay less for my fuel but I felt like they were trying to con me into changing without even realising I was doing so. I am now very unlikely ever to contemplate using n-power in future. They should stop this practice as they will get some very negative pr from people like me. IMHO door to door sales is about as low as it gets anyway.

Rant over. 

I was having difficulty getting to sleep last night and started wondering what happens to a persons blog when they die.

Currently this blog lives on my server at home so I wouldn't reckon on it lasting too long after my passing should I be struck down by a Bus or Psyclist in london.

Most folks who blog use a company that they pay to host or will host for free, I wonder what there policy is.

Then I got to thinking wouldn't it be nice if there was a website that offered to host blogs of the deceased.

On the face of it this would seem to be an altruistic service but I sure there is a VC out there trying to figure out the ad revenue business model.

I'm going to do some google based research and report my findings here, watch this space.....

Every now and then I have a half baked idea for a new kind of Gizmo, today I was staring at the mess of cables on my desk and thought up this.

A device that replaces the multitude of cables that inhabit the back of your desk with one single fat cable for neatness.
Could also develop a wirless version using wimax technology.
Including:
- 2 x A/C Power for monitors
- 2 x DVI / VGA for Dual screen
- 1 x USB (built in powered hub
-- Four ports for:
--- Keyboard
--- mouse
--- Other peripherals

So I am relatively new to using merge tools. I have been developing with them for about a year. Merge tools become a necessity if you are developing in a team, or working on branches in your source control system. You do have to be ultra careful when you are merging against another developers changes. The merge tool you use for this is key, a good tool will help you quickly assess the differences and let you combine them quickly and accurately.

Tools that cost $$$

At work we use Araxis Merge and it is a great tool, it is a very polished piece of software it makes merging files easy, it supports three way merges and has a fast folder comparison utility. It is relatively expensive at $79 but represents good value for money.

Jeff Attwood wrote an article on his blog about Beyond Compare, I am going to try this out as I need a tool for my dev work at home and this is only $30 according to Jeff it is every bit as good as Araxis and a lot cheaper.

Tools that are free

Scott Hansleman has written about free Diff Tools on his blog his pick of the bunch is WinMergesome of the others he mentions are KDiff3 and  DiffMerge .

I always try and avoid using these keywords when naming objects in SQL Server:

ADD	EXCEPT	PERCENT
ALL	EXEC	PLAN
ALTER	EXECUTE	PRECISION
AND	EXISTS	PRIMARY
ANY	EXIT	PRINT
AS	FETCH	PROC
ASC	FILE	PROCEDURE
AUTHORIZATION	FILLFACTOR	PUBLIC
BACKUP	FOR	RAISERROR
BEGIN	FOREIGN	READ
BETWEEN	FREETEXT	READTEXT
BREAK	FREETEXTTABLE	RECONFIGURE
BROWSE	FROM	REFERENCES
BULK	FULL	REPLICATION
BY	FUNCTION	RESTORE
CASCADE	GOTO	RESTRICT
CASE	GRANT	RETURN
CHECK	GROUP	REVOKE
CHECKPOINT	HAVING	RIGHT
CLOSE	HOLDLOCK	ROLLBACK
CLUSTERED	IDENTITY	ROWCOUNT
COALESCE	IDENTITY_INSERT	ROWGUIDCOL
COLLATE	IDENTITYCOL	RULE
COLUMN	IF	SAVE
COMMIT	IN	SCHEMA
COMPUTE	INDEX	SELECT
CONSTRAINT	INNER	SESSION_USER
CONTAINS	INSERT	SET
CONTAINSTABLE	INTERSECT	SETUSER
CONTINUE	INTO	SHUTDOWN
CONVERT	IS	SOME
CREATE	JOIN	STATISTICS
CROSS	KEY	SYSTEM_USER
CURRENT	KILL	TABLE
CURRENT_DATE	LEFT	TEXTSIZE
CURRENT_TIME	LIKE	THEN
CURRENT_TIMESTAMP	LINENO	TO
CURRENT_USER	LOAD	TOP
CURSOR	NATIONAL	TRAN
DATABASE	NOCHECK	TRANSACTION
DBCC	NONCLUSTERED	TRIGGER
DEALLOCATE	NOT	TRUNCATE
DECLARE	NULL	TSEQUAL
DEFAULT	NULLIF	UNION
DELETE	OF	UNIQUE
DENY	OFF	UPDATE
DESC	OFFSETS	UPDATETEXT
DISK	ON	USE
DISTINCT	OPEN	USER
DISTRIBUTED	OPENDATASOURCE	VALUES
DOUBLE	OPENQUERY	VARYING
DROP	OPENROWSET	VIEW
DUMMY	OPENXML	WAITFOR
DUMP	OPTION	WHEN
ELSE	OR	WHERE
END	ORDER	WHILE
ERRLVL	OUTER	WITH
ESCAPE	OVER	WRITETEXT

Model Name          : Vigor2820 series
Firmware Version   : 3.1.1
Build Date/Time     : Nov 8 2007 11:10:43
ADSL Firmware      : 211801_A Annex A

Price: £135 inc VAT

I have just bought one of these to use in a small office.

First impressions are it is good value for money in terms of the features if offers.
The web UI is uninspiring a little better than a Netgear or a DLink but nowhere near as good as a m0n0wall. It is responsive but not intuitive.
One bad point for anyone who has to administer several units the config file is backed up in binary format, a more sensible choice would have been XML to allow tweaks and roll-outs.
You can't see recent log entries in the web admin screens you have to install the syslog tool on a pc on your lan, and configure the router to send logs to it, not good if you are a remote admin.
PPTP I have failed to get this working so far, I wanted to use the windows built in PPTP client to connect to the router, so far a connection can be established but authentication fails, I haven't given up but it would be nice if this had worked straight out the box like m0n0wall. Draytek supply a Smart VPN client of their own but this too fails to authenticate.

I will update this review in about a month, if I can get PPTP working I will be pretty happy if not it may have to go back to the shop.

This has to be the funniest most original game reviewer on the web. He is also very knowledgable

The Escapist

This will r0x0r your b0x0r's!

http://lifehacker.com/357869/use-your-wii-as-a-media-center

The article explains in several easy steps how to turn your wii into a media center.

I tried it and could not believe how well it works!

Some things you will need:

• A Wii with wireless access to the internet
• The latest version for the Wii Opera Browser (You have to buy this $5/£3)
• A pc to install the Orb Software

So how does it work?
Well I don't know the detail but so far as I can tell the client software you install on your pc stream's media to the Orb server which streams it back to your browser.

I had to unblock some of the ports on my pc's windows firewall to get the streaming to work.

It's early days but so far i'm impressed with the Web UI nice big fonts for the TV and very intuitive I think I have seen the future.

The HM22W is a nice TV for a bedroom, the picture is good with no ghosting and a wide viewing angle.

The built in speakers are a bit limp so don't expect high volume.

The remote control is easy to use if a little more complicated that is necessary.

The unit only has an analogue tuner so if you want freeview you will need a digi-box.

It has a good range of inputs, 1 Scart, Video, Composite, VGA, HDMI. The VGA connector allows the unit to be used as a PC monitor. I have a SKY box connected via scart and a PS2 connected via video  to mine and both are fine.

I bought this just before christmas and paid just under £200 which was cheap.

Ebuyer sells these in the UK

A few weeks ago one of the devs in the trading system team hit a performance issue, running four threads on a multicore machine ran slower than running when processor affinity was turned on.

Turning on processor affinity basically was limiting his application to one core so he expected a performance hit.

After three weeks of searching he found the answer: smartheap

He was making extensive use of the STL and with the default VS memory allocation and a multi processor machine this was causing problems.

The answer was to replace the standard library with smartheap (there are other alternatives) and this fixed the problem.

I am blogging about this in case there are other people out banging heads on desks trying to work out why their app is slower on a multicore server rather than a single core one.

If you nose around this blog you will see I am not a C++ developer so don't ask me for any more detail.

One of my new year's resolutions was to upgrade to the latest version of dasblog and host it on ASP.NET 2.0.

Well this is probably the only resolution I will keep.

I chose the MadsSimple theme I really liked the business theme but the blog post font was a little small and this is a personal blog so MadsSimple seemed to work better.

With this update of DasBlog many more asp.net hosting companies become usable, as the "Medium Trust" hosting issue has been addressed, hope you enjoy the new look.

What is wikimapia ?

Well it seem's appropriate to quote Wikipedia...
"WikiMapia is an online map and satellite imaging resource that combines Google Maps with a wiki system, allowing users to add information (in the form of a note) to any location on earth.^[2] It is one of the top 1000 websites visited,^[3] and has over 5 million places marked.^[4] It was created by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev, and was launched on May 24, 2006 with the aim of "describing the whole planet Earth".

It is a great site, where you can tag anywhere in the world* with a box and some details about the location. The site is geared towards commercial enterprises but anyone can tag anything (within reason). You can tag your house, school, gym, place of work whatever you like.

* Image resolution will vary

This is a very sad story, a blogging soldier who was killed in Iraq had made arrangements with a friend to put up a final blog post in the event of his death.

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/01/andy-olmsted.html

The sterophonics have got it spot on, and this applies equally to software development when it comes to architecture. I went to the last DNUG meeting where Ian Cooper gave a great one hour presentation on Monorail one of the points he emphasised during the talk is to employ "Just enough architecture" is all you need. Over architehcting will usually lead to uneccessary complexity in your application.

The question that logically follows the above is, how much is enough? Well if you find yourself writing a lot of code to do something that is fairly trivial and the consumers of your application are not deriving any gain then the chances are you have over engineered the solution. As a developer it is easy to be lured by fancy patterns and advanced architectures, as you are probably fueled by a desire to improve your own understanding of them. A good developer's first loyalty should always be to employ the most elegant and efficient means to complete the task.

So what are the consequences of a needlessly complicated design? For starters you will be less agile, decisions to implement changes will have to be more considered due to the possible impact they could have. New team members will take longer to get up to speed and will need more guideance. The amount of resources needed for maintaining the application and the quality of that resource may also be greater.

In the end it comes down to this, you wouldn't use a sledge hammer to open your boiled egg at breakfast, so don't use a polymorphic, OO, MVC solution when a batch file will do.

Credit is endemic in the developed countries of the world, it is the oil between the cogs of the economy, if you remove access to credit what will happen?

Firstly even a worst case scenario would not see all lines of credit dissapear, applying for credit would become a more rigourous process both on the high street and commercially. Interest rates may increase this would have a knock on effect of reducing spending power and increasing the cost of production. The first place this will have an effect is in the housing market, typically this is the biggest loan taken out by consumers.

It is a well know fact in the UK where demand for housing outstrips supply that cheap credit (low interest rates) increases peoples purchasing power and thus causes house prices to rise. The banks willingness to lend money or access to credit is another factor, in the UK banks have been lowering the bar and increasing the ratio of income multiples. Five years ago the standard income multiples used by all banks was 2.5 x joint salary or three times single salary. This lending criteria was introduced by banks as a straighforward sanity check to prevent customers over commiting themselves. Increasing this ratio as quickly and by as much as 4.5 times joint salary and five times single was a bold move by the banks. It is understandable why they did it, more and more of the customers coming to them were priced out of the market and could not afford to get on the property ladder. They were creditworthy but could not borrow enough cash to buy the house / flat they wanted, the solution was simple but the consequences of the solution may be unpleasant.

Second mortgages and remortgaging your house can be an effective way to finance a purchase, the security of your home will often mean a lower interest rate, however, some consumers have deluded themselves as to what they can actually afford. The increased security of lending against your property will also mean you can borrow more than an unsecured loan. Finance and mortgage companies will pay less attention to a customers credit history and ability to pay if they can offer some security (their house), in this situation responsible lending is less likely to occur.

So what is the worst case scenario for the UK housing market? Well a house price crash, fuelled by higher interest rates and consumers inability to obtain credit. This could easily lead to a recession due to people repaying their more expensive mortgages not having any spare cash to spend on fancy meals and in the shops. We could re-live the 80's bust all over again. In the longer term this would probably be healthy for the economy by lowering house prices. The fundamental problem the shortage of good housing would not have been addressed, only the government can tackle this by removing some the restrictions preventing new houses from being built.

create your own visited country map or check our Venice travel guide

In SQL 2005 you can still use sysperfinfo but it is now deprecated and you should start reading data from sys.dm_os_performance_counters if you have monitoring in place for SQL2000 and are migrating to 2005 you should probably update your scripts. One other change you might need to make is to the column that stores cntr_value as this is now a BigInt in SQL server 2005.
This article covers how to monitor performance pre SQL 2005 which is still relevant but attached to this post is an updated script for SQL 2005 It is recommended that you create a new "Performance" database on your server and run these scripts in. Then setup a job that executes every minute to record the performance data.

Update:
It turns out there is a bug in the SQL 2005 user connections counter. The counter is not reduced when a Service Broker task is ended. The result is the "User Connections" counter keeps getting bigger and bigger. SP2 has just been released but this is still an issue I guess MS may fix this in SP3

Script to monitor sysperfinfo updated naming conventions SQL 2005.sql (4.84 KB)

I work as a developer mainly within the financial services sector. The solution my company develops is complex and handles all aspects of a finance company's business. The product is quite mature having first been developed in classic ASP then redeveloped in ASP.NET. It does all the day to day stuff well and offers great benefits in terms of information management and automation of repetitive tasks.
The other day I was thinking how could we significantly improve the product and I came up with two areas that currently represent problems that are non trivial to fix.
Firstly due to the complex nature of the system the finance companies would like to be able to test configuration changes for exsiting and new clients. When they have tested them they would like to be able to auto-promote those changes to Live in a controlled manner and if there were any problems roll back the changes quickly. This represents something of a design challenge. We can build as many environments as we like but promoting changes from one to the next is not straightforward. We could create some stored procedures that would move data accross from a Trial database to the Live one but it is not obvious how these changes could later be rolled back, what's more these stored procedures would have to be maintained whenever schema changes occured. It would also be difficult to know whether all changes in the trial environment were to be moved or just specific ones for specific clients. I can see there being a solution for promoting specific changes as required by the finance company but not a generic solution to this problem.

The other major problem we face is regression testing after new functionality is added or existing functionality is altered. Like any complex solution there is a lot of interaction within the system changing something can have one desired effect and five undesired ones. If we could do it all again differently maybe a test driven development approach would help allieveate some of this pain. The only problem with this approach is it would have taken longer to get a working product out the door. At the time the highest priority was to get to a point where we had a working solution. This could be viewed as short-term thinking but the finances of the company were dictating this. It is also worth remembering we were developing web applications when the internet was a pimply faced youth so there was a steep learning curve as no-one had done it before and written a book on how to do it.

My incredibly generous (shopaholic) wife gave me a Wii for valentines day. I wasn't expecting it as I had only intimated that I would like one in september for my birthday.

The Wii is different from 'normal' consoles because the controllers offer a much more natural experience. You can literally place a controller in the hands of someone who has never played a computer game in their life and after 30 seconds of instruction, sit back and watch them play Wii Sports Tennis. The Wii seriously broadens the audience of people that will enjoy using a console and allows three generations of a familly to enjoy the gaming experience together. If you don't believe me try discussing the merits of Halo on the Xbox with your Grandma then ask her to have a go at Wii tennis and see which she enjoys the most.
In essence then the Wii is all about fun and doesn't take itself too seriously it is the volkswagen beetle of the console world and I think Nintendo have struck gold with it.

You can sign the online petition using the link below, after you sign an email is sent to you for confirmation. At time of writing over 1.3 million people have signed
Sign up

I have just wasted several days of my life trying to get dasBlog hosted on my Brinkster account. I wanted to use ASP 2.0 and version 1.9 of dasBlog unfortunately at the time of writing this is impossible.

Brinkster have set <trust level="Medium"> in their servers's machine.config this is not overridable in your web.config if you try and override it your app will blow up. dasBlog was originally architected under 1.1 and designed to use <trust level="Full"> you can read more on the Brinkster forum here.

There is an alternative Thinkjot which does work but comes with this warning "It may be unstable and cause problems in the application pool" read more here . I have only just installed it and will update this post at a later date if I encounter problems. You can get thinkjot here it is based on dasBlog but has been written to work at the medium trust level. To get it working you must get create a subfolder in your webroot folder then upload the Thinkjot files and folders to it. You must edit the web.config file and comment out the line <trust level="Medium" originUrl=""/>. In the SiteConfig folder you must edit the site.config file and set the <Root> element to the URL of your blog. You can edit these files locally and upload them or use the brinkster file manager. You must then contact the brinkster live chat support and ask them to give read / write permission to NETWORKSERVICE on three subfolders <yourfolder>\content <yourfolder>\logs <yourfolder>\SiteConfig and create a VIRTUAL WEBROOT for <yourfolder>. They will only do this if you have a DEVELOPER hosting package multiple virtual roots are not supported in lesser packages.

When Brinkster switched the trust level to Medium just before christmas many of their customers sites that were using ASP 2.0  stopped working, if you are contemplating using Brinkster or any other hosting company for a 2.0 application you should read this.

I have become a Just-Dial affiliate and built a website to promote the service. Anyone can do this all you need to do is register on their website. My new website is www.Dial360.co.uk. I am in the final stages of completing it, hoping to finish it off this weekend. The site is built completely in ASP,NET 2.0 using master pages. I am impressed with how easy it was to build.

A techie friend just introduced me to Zimbra, he has recently switched his small company from a hosted exchange solution to a hosted ZimbraCS solution. In the UK you can get a hosted Zimbra mailbox for £3.99 per month, for this fee you get an Ajax web client, seamless integration with Outlook and many other webclients. Mobile messaging, some of the solution providers offer support for Blackberry's some are still working at it. You enjoy shared calendars and a lot of the other collaberative features Exchange offers without the serious support overhead.

Zimbra is still fairly new but has some serious VC muscle behind it so watch this space. My company Redline Software made a concious decision to avoid Exchange due to it's support overhead and the horror stories that have circulated about corrupt database files and elongated periods of outage were also driving factors. Instead we opted for a simple solution called Mailenable that did a great job as a Pop3 server and integrated nicely with Outlook. We lost out on the collabarative features of Exchange but we were a small company so collabaration wasn't a big issue for us. We are still using Mailenable but are evaluating ZimbraCS.

I have just switched my ISP,  I've been with Plusnet for over four years and the first three and a half years the service was excellent. I need an ISP that offers a static IP address so I can host my own personal website and blog. As BT have just bought Plusnet and even though Plusnet are making a lot of noise saying that things aren't going to change i'm not prepared to be a guinea pig, especially not where BT are involved. I hope i'm wrong and Plusnet sort out their recent support issues.

Plusnet's loss is Zen internets gain, they offer an 8mb lite package where you get 2GB downloads and 8 static IP addresses for £18 per month. Their reputation for troubleshooting support issues is good but time will tell.

All I had to do to get a MAC code was raise a support ticket at Plusnet and then listen to a salesman for five minutes try and convince me to stay, then sign up at Zen.

The nokia 2610 is a great phone if you just want to make phone calls and are not very good at remembering to charge your mobile as it has a claimed battery life of 12 days standby or 3 hours talk time.

For the Nokia technical specs click here

It doesn't have a camera or bluetooth and it's cheap, £60 buys the version that can be used with the major networks in the UK, and Orange will do a locked version for £40 pay as you talk The screen is clear but difficult to see in direct sunlight. It has a Built-in hands-free speaker which is important when driving in the UK. As I have only had the phone a few days I will update this post at a later date to give a more detailed account of the 2610.

At last a phone that is cheap and good at one thing.. making phone calls!

Update: I have been using this phone for over a week now...

The Good Stuff:

Battery Life - 7days made / recieved 45 mins

Easy to read display

Asthetically pleasing

small and lightweight

Menu easy to navigate

The Bad Stuff:

Buttons are shiny so fingernails can slide off

Button press not very sure

Annoyances:

When Scrolling quickly through contacts the display doesn't keep up so it is easy to overshoot and dial the wrong number

Menu navigation is bit laggy

Futher Update:
I have been using this phone for well over a year now, no faults and the battery life is still as good as ever. All of the above still applies.

I am probably centuries behind here but today I learnt that you can add rss feeds to your personalised google home page.

I am a big fan of having control over my homepage, In the past I have written simple HTML pages containing links to the sites I use most often, at work I have used sharepoint which is excellent and allows me to edit links in my browser. I was interested to see if google home page offered the ability to add urls, so far I have not found this with the exception of RSS. If the website has a feed and more and more do then it can be added and will appear much like any other gadget. What is more the last three items in the feed will also be displayed, very cool. To do this click the 'Add Stuff' link then click the 'Add by Url' icon, then type or paste the url of the feed in and click Add.

There are multitude of 'Gadgets' you can add to your home page, my favourites are the Time, Weather Forecast and the Virgin Radio Tuner, but there are thousands of others.

I spent most of Dec 2006 and a little bit of Jan 2007 in Australia, my wife and I flew into Melbourne on the 9th Dec. It was my first visit and is now my favourite city in Oz. Mebourne is significantly cheaper than Sydney and has a lot more to do than Cairns. A taxi driver told me 4 million people live in and around the city but it didn't have the in your face crowds of Sydney or London and felt a lot more relaxed. One night we ate on the Tram Car restaurnt that tours round the city whilst serving up meals, the food was good considering the size of the kitchen and we had a good banter with the table next to us, the waiters were friendly, the meal and drinks are all inclusive for Aus$100 / £40 so it wasn't even expensive.

A couple of days later we went for a meal at the Flower Drum, which is billed as the best Cantonese restaurant in the southern hemisphere, I have no way to verify the validity of this but the food was fantastic. We booked three months in advance and could only get a thursday night, so book early to avoid disapointment. The highlights of the meal were a waiter arriving  to make your peking duck pancakes for you, the steamed oysters and the beef in black bean sauce which melted in the mouth. The only problem is we wont be able to order a chinese take away for months now we are back home.

I met up with and old friend David who I hadn't seen since I was sixteen, he has been living in Melbourne for seven years and graciously he offered to accompany us to a couple of his favourite restaurants. The first was a Japanese restaurant and the second a Vietnamese, the food in both was great and the bill was tiny working out at around £10 a head for lots of food. A lot of the Melbourne restaurants have a BYO licence and a bottle shop nearby, so if you like wine you can afford to spoil yourself a little.

We also took a Tram down to the beach at Port Melbourne and took a boat down the Yarra river to Williamstown both  trips were pleasant if not eventful. Kilda beach is also a short tram ride away and has a lively night life and a nice beach and some good shops. We stayed in the Langham Hotel in Southbank which is 5star and was only Aus$200 / £80 a night, the hotel was great the staff were friendly and it was well located for exploring the city, it also has really nice terrace with a pool overlooking the Yarra river, I would highly recommend it.

After eight days in Melbourne we flew up to Byron Bay for christmas, Bryon is a chilled seaside town with a beautiful beach a few nice restaurants and good pubs and bars, the beach is ranked in the top 25 beaches around the world, and the people are great and very laid back. There are lots of surfers and you can go on dolphin / whale / turtle watching tours if that's your thing. Byron is a great place to sit back and do very little except sunbathe and drink beer. We stayed in the Beachcomber motel on Shirly St, it was plesant enough but the motels and appartments on Lawson St looked nicer, maybe they are more expensive though.

The last part of the holiday was Sydney, we were staying at the Novotel that overlooks Darling harbour, this is a 4star hotel and it doesn't have any frills, we booked harbour view room which is worth the extra dosh as the Sydney skyline is impressive. Darling harbour is a good place to stay if you are holidaying in Sydney, you are a ten minute walk from the shopping district and you can take a boat into Circular Quay (next to Sydney Opera House) the trip only takes ten minutes. A friend of my was getting married on the 29th December, the reception was out past watsons bay, it was a great wedding and I got very drunk.

We were also in Sydney for new years eve and had booked table on a cruise boat so that we could eat, drink, be merry and watch the fireworks in comfort. This was expensive Aus$500 / £200 a head but we firgured it was unlikely we would repeat the experience any time soon. The food was good the beer / champagne kept flowing and the fireworks were impressive.

Alas it was all over so soon, fortunately my wife gave me tickets to Thailand for christmas so I only have to wait till April to see the sun again.

Over the last few weeks I have been listening to the archive of Hanselminutes, a new(ish) dotnet developer podcast by Scott Hanselman. Scott is the kind of developer who can't resist a beta and is currently reporting his progress with Vista via his blog. The shows are usually 20-30 mins and cut straight to the chase giving us developer types the sort of content we crave, so point your podcatching client at the show and enjoy.

 

I did some digging into the upcoming Open XML formats and found a great article by Ted Pattison explaining the changes MS have made. Essentially the new docx format is a zip file containing a bunch of other files mostly XML files that make up a word document ms refer to this as the 'Package'. Ted has written a great article that explains how it all hangs together in some detail.

So why did MS go to all this trouble? Well folks like me want to be able to programatically work with Word documents on the serverside so we can automate certain processes. The old binary formats supported by previous versions were unfriendly so we tended to use the word object model or VBA to do this. These were not very performant and less than 100% reliable. So according to Ted the new formats will allow manipulation of word files without installation of Word via some new .Net classes. To start with this will not be straightforward, first you will have to familiarise yourself with how a docx package is structured, but I imagine some coding gurus have begun work on this already and by the time Office 2007 is released you will be able to purchase a 3rd party component that will make indenting paragraphs a snip.

We have a need to manipulate bookmarks so we can inject data into documents prior to converting them to PDF's. I am on the lookout for worthy open source projects that are attempting to undertake this task, I would gladly make a contribution to their efforts in order to reap the rewards :o)

Another great article that goes into more detail

A project with example code on how to create a simple docx from scratch.

http://boulter.com/blog/2004/08/19/performant-is-not-a-word/