About a month ago Microsoft anounced that a future version of office (code name office12) would support open XML based formats for Word, Excel and Powerpoint. If you currently use these formats then this could be a big deal for you.

Our document production module at Redline Software makes extensive use of the Word object model but has hit a performance brick wall which we have solved by using lots of servers to render documents. The announcement that MS intend to open up the .doc format means that we will be able to manipulate Word files as text (XML) which should be much faster and give us greater control over the output and remove this brick wall.

Brian Jones is on the Microsoft Office team and keeps a blog here, both he and Jean Paoli have asked for feedback from developers about the new format specifications. If you think you will make extensive use of these it may pay dividends to check them out whilst they are still in development and give the office team your feedback when they can incorporate it.

So I decided to move my boot disk off the onboard controller on my Shuttle and on to a Sillicon Image sil3112a Sata RAID controller card. Before doing this I installed the drivers for the card, but when I tried rebooting I got as far as the windows logo boot screen and then the pc restarted itself.

I reconnected the drive to the onboard controller ran Sysprep then shutdown, connected the drive to the sil3112a and restarted and bingo, all I had to do was re-enter the product key and setup a user account and I was up and running.

This was done on a Windows XP SP2 build pre activation, so it might involve a call to MS if you have already activated.

I have just ordered a second drive and I'm going to attempt to create a mirror on the sil3112a so that if one of my drives blows a gasket I won't have to rebuild my machine from scratch.

Unfortunately my blog has been getting more and more trackback spam so I have decided  to turn trackbacks off until I upagrade to v1.8 of dasblog. I hope all those trackback spamming monkeys rot in hell!

This post on Neville Hobson's blog caught my eye. Podcast Con Uk is a one day event with speakers talking about podcasting either check out nevilles blog or head on over to PodcastCon UK to sign up or find out more.

Saw a friend on the weekend who runs his own landscape gardening business in Surrey if your garden is in need of some TLC check his website out at www.JHsmith.co.uk. If you are just at the ideas stage there are lots of pictures in the portfolio section.

Consume a .NET Assembly from a classic ASP page. by Darren Neimke

 

All I would add is that RegAsm lives in:

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322

NB
Beware of parameterized constructors, i.e. defining a Sub New() with parameters, if you do this your class will not be eligible for COM registration and won't show up in the registry or be creatable from your ASP pages / VB components.

I got the above error when trying to generate a strong name key running filemon (see www.sysinternals.com) it showed that there was a file access error for me on the folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto

I had to give myself permissions on this folder and tell windows to propogate them to all the child objects then I could successfully generate a key using

SN.exe -k mykey.snk

This is the first time I've used filemon but I doubt it will be the last.

Okay so it turns out it's all about performance (read my previous post) not forcing VB6 developers in ADO to set command parameter attributes like size and type, meant an additional round trip to the database. I don't have a problem with MS taking this functionality out for the default but they could have allowed us a way to turn it back on.

Fear not I a have written a class that will go off to the database fetch all the attributes of the parameters in your query so that all you have to do is specify the values. WARNING: This will slow things down two trips to the database are slower than one, the only way I can see you could remove some of this overhead would be come up with a caching scheme.

I have tried to comment the code so you should find it fairly straghtforward to use, I have only tried using it on SQL Server 2000 so far. The source is attached to this post for your dining pleasure.

SQL.zip (1.51 KB)

What were the MS programmers smoking when they coded the System.Data.SQLClient and System.Data.Oledb wrappers? My beef is that under VB6 I made extensive use of parameterized stored procedures, with a couple of functions that handled the creating the connection and command object I had reduced the amount of code to:

Set Cm = GetCm("sp_MyStoredProc")
Cm.Execute

For a recordset it took a little more effort:

Set Cm = GetCm("sp_MyStoredProc")
Rs.Open(Cm)

For a parameterised query:

Set Cm = GetCm("sp_MyStoredProc")
SetCommandParameter Cm, "@MyParam", "Test"
Cm.Execute

With VB.net this has increased greatly as now I have to specify the Direction of the paramter and the size or get a runtime error!! Surely any observer can see this is a step backwards. If a stored procedure's parameter is altered so that the application now sets the wrong parameter direction and errors this is going to cause pain. If the reason this has been introduced is to speed things up then where's the option to turn it off and do it the old way?

If MS are trying to encourage VB6 old timers like myself to adopt their fancy new .Net then they should be trying to make my life easier not cause me to rip what little hair I have left out!

 

I am off to my first DNUG meeting where I'll be participating in the XP game. Hopefully my understanding of agile programming techniques will be increased profoundly and i'll also get to talk tech with like minded souls instead of boring the ears off my friends and relatives.

That's the big problem with being a tech-head, I find myself almost apoligising after responding to what I do for a living, unless the interviewer happens also to love all things binary. If that is the case I find I end up spending hours talking to that person an ignoring all others, i'm sure I have a form of OCD and my wife agrees.

DNUG was founded by Ian Cooper when he discovered there were already many user groups in the US but none in London, it is free to join and the central activity is a meeting a month to discuss new technologies that will impact dotnet developers. If this sounds appealing you can subscribe to the mailing list here and if any of the topics catch your eye sign up and come along.