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 Wednesday, November 30, 2005

If you've ever wanted to use keyboard shortcuts for functions you would normally use a mouse for then look in Options > Keyboard. Here you can define your own personal scheme containing shortcuts you define. You can copy an existing scheme to base yours on.

I leveraged this to map Go To Definition on to CTRL+F which suits me fine because my favourite text editor that I use for a lot of Classic ASP work uses the same short cut to search for a highlighted word.

The list of actions you can map is extensive, but it would probably be folly to go wild and re-map everything, that said there is always one or two useful amendments that make life easier.

Wednesday, November 30, 2005 6:00:56 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Comments [0] -

 Thursday, November 10, 2005

Whilst the IE team have expended vast resources to develop a Pop-Up blocker it seems someone forgot to tell the Windows Update team that people genrally despise things that go Pop. This wretched message keeps appearing on my machine and stealing the focus when it does so.

If would like to feedback information to the Windows Update team they operate a discussion forum on the Microsoft Site you can find it here: Windows Update Discussion

 

Thursday, November 10, 2005 1:36:56 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Comments [0] -

A colleague at work got this error message when using a piece of online banking software.

Don't mess with this app

Thursday, November 10, 2005 11:50:23 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Comments [0] -

 Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Stephen has an interesting post on his blog about how to query the native XML data type in SQL 2005.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005 9:15:10 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Comments [0] -

http://www.clonethegoogleapi.com/

This is an idea put forward by Dave Winer and Robert Scoble gives his opinion on the idea.

I think it is a really good idea that could be applied to lots of other things like messaging.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005 9:07:04 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Comments [0] -

They do, they really really really do, i'm biased because they are my brother in-laws band and are playing a couple of gigs in london over the next few weeks. You can find out more about the band at www.silver-lounge.co.uk you can also download four tracks, and subscribe to their podcast.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005 8:30:20 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Comments [0] -

 Saturday, September 17, 2005

I just took and passed my Motorcycle theory test, this enables me to take my practical test in the next two years. It is a 2 part test first is 35 multiple choice questions which are straightforward if you read the bock "The official theory test for motorcycles". The second part is a hazzard perception test, you watch a series of 14 video clips and are expected to click the mouse as you spot potential and actual hazzards. The second part is more natural if you have been driving a car for a few years.

The test is all done on a computer and the input is via touchscreen and mouse, the software is well written and the UI is intuitive, not what I was expecting. You can complete both parts of the test in less than 30 mins or if you take the full 40 mins for part one it would take just over an hour to complete.

All I have to do now is tell my wife I'm going to sit my pratical test, she has been less than encouraging when I have mentioned it in the past :)

 

Saturday, September 17, 2005 1:51:10 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Comments [0] -

 Wednesday, September 07, 2005

When I first started using Typed Datasets I fell into a couple of pitfalls that took me a day to figure out. To prevent some poor soul from suffering like I did here are some notes.

I work almost exclusivly with Stored Procedures, and i'm assuming you already know how to create a typed dataset. I don't like 'myDataSet' type examples so I have create a real world one, this dataset returns a result set with all the addresses associated with a customers proposal so is inventively called ProposalAddresses.

VB.Net 2003 Example Code:




'Declare an instance of the typed dataset you have already created
Dim dsProposalAddress As New ProposalAddresses

'Create a command to pass to the Get SqlDataAdapter function
'We need a SqlDataAdapter in order to populate our Typed Dataset,
'we need a SqlCommand object to tell our SqlDataAdapter where to
'get its data and what parameters to pass to the database.
Dim Command As New SqlClient.SqlCommand("sp_AddressSummary")
'Set the commands properties
Command.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure
'Okay so you will have to create your own SQLConnection Object before reaching this point.
Command.Connection = MyConn
'If your stored procedure takes any parameters create them here.
Dim Proposal As New SqlClient.SqlParameter
Proposal.ParameterName = "@ProposalID"
Proposal.SqlDbType = SqlDbType.Int
Proposal.Value = ProposalID
'Attach your parameter to your command
Command.Parameters.Add(Proposal)
'===============================
'This line creates your SqlDataAdapter using the SqlCommand Object you have just created.
Dim daProposalAddresses As New SqlDataAdapter(Command)

'!! IMPORTANT: With Typed Datasets you must specify
'the additional parameter TableName when calling .Fill or Table(0)
'will not contain any rows and your DS members will not hold any data
daProposalAddresses.Fill(dsProposalAddress, dsProposalAddress.Tables(0).TableName)

'== Test what has been returned in your dataset ==
'This line returns from Row(0) the value in the FullAddress Column
MsgBox(dsProposalAddress.sp_AddressSummary(0).FullAddress)
'This line returns from Row(1) the value in the FullAddress Column
MsgBox(dsProposalAddress.sp_AddressSummary(1).FullAddress)



This code is to demonstrate how to retrieve data from a typed dataset, if you are going to be doing a lot of data access in your application you should consider creating a class that will hide away the above routines and reduce the amount of code you need to write.

Wednesday, September 07, 2005 11:05:08 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Comments [2] -

 Thursday, August 18, 2005

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.

Thursday, August 18, 2005 8:16:06 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Comments [0] -

 Wednesday, August 17, 2005

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.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005 2:46:03 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Comments [0] -

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Charlie Barker
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