Month: April 2006

Penguicon 4

Penguicon is rocking.

My demos went poorly on Friday regarding Mono and ASP.NET.

http://home.comcast.net/~jrwren04/Penguicon4.0/ASPNETMonoIntro/Presentation.html

But I think the overall message of the presentation was well recieved. I tend to NOT put all the points I make on slides. The ASP.NET presentation is indicative of this. It is only 5 slides. There is a title, 2 pictures, an analogy and a list of references.

Saturday’s Mono GUI apps panel went awesome. There were times where I could hear the audience awe when I showed the GTK# app I built using MonoDevelop on Dapper was copied to windows and executed. I did the same for a trivial Windows Forms app built using Visual Studio 2005 and the executable ran fine in Mono on Dapper. Thank you Ubuntu. Thank you Mono.

I wanted to simply demo some GTK# apps on Ubuntu, but my VMWare image doesn’t have any interesting photos for f-spot or music for Banshee. I thought I would remote X run my app from home, but I stumbled upon Xorg on Dapper lacking LBX support. I think the deps have changed in 7.0. I filled a bug and I’m working to fixing it.

I love my friends

They say that pictures speak a thousand words. What does this picture speak to you?

I haven’t seen many of these guys in a while. I miss you all. If I were awesome at webstuff I’d make this webpage play Carol King’s “So Far Away” because that is how I fell, but also to give you fuel to make fun of me when next I see you.

Microsoftie praises MySQL?

Ok, maybe it is not praise, but CodeBetter.com is usually a very .NET and Microsoft centric site/blog. These types typically won’t even mention a product if it isn’t made by MS or support an MS product (Studio plugins).

It was nice to see Karl post on Paging Data – MySQL > Microsoft. It was nice, and I agree the LIMIT clause of MySQL is VERY nice, short, and sweet. PostgreSQL achieves the same thing using LIMIT and OFFSET. On our SQL 2000 Server Databases we sometimes use a stored procedure which I found on the internet somewhere a few months ago. (I think from http://www.vbdotnetheaven.com/Code/Sept2003/2173.asp)


CREATE PROC dbo.GetPagedData

@pageSize int,
@tablename varchar(100) ,
@PrimaryKey varchar(50) ,
@CurrentPage int ,
@WhereClause varchar(250)

AS

if(@WhereClause IS NULL or @WhereClause='') Set @WhereClause=' 1=1 '
Declare @sql nvarchar(4000)
declare @numrecs int

Set @numrecs=@pageSize*@currentPage

set @sql='SELECT TOP ' + cast(@pageSize as varchar(5))+' * FROM ' +@tablename
Set @sql =@sql + ' WHERE '+cast(@PrimaryKey as varchar(50))+ ' NOT IN (SELECT TOP '
set @sql=@sql+ cast(@numrecs as varchar(5))
set @sql=@Sql+ ' ' +@primarykey +' FROM ' +@tableName + ' WHERE '+@whereClause +
' ORDER BY ' +cast(@primarykey as varchar(50)) +' ) '
set @Sql=@sql + ' AND '+ @whereClause
Set @Sql=@Sql + ' ORDER BY '+cast(@primarykey as varchar(50))
--print @sql

EXEC sp_executeSql @sql

Set @sql='Select count(*) FROM ' +@tablename + ' WHERE ' +@whereclause

EXEC sp_executeSql @sql

You can see that this generates SQL in the form of

SELECT TOP ${pagesize} *
FROM table
WHERE somekey NOT IN (
SELECT TOP ${pagesize times currentpage} somekey FROM table WHERE query ORDER BY somekey )
AND query ORDER BY somekey

I find that VERY readable. Not as readable as the MySQL and PostgreSQL options, but it is more readable than the SQL2005 method Maybe it doesn’t work or doesn’t perform well, but we use it without issues.

Spongy? It Is Called JavaSpaces!

Hi David L!

David proposes something called Blanket.NET and “Spongy” Interfaces. This is a great idea and I welcome it as an addition to the dotnet framework, however I think we already have it. A little time with IKVM and JavaSpaces and the same functionality and more should already exist. I’ve been meaning to try the Glitz JavaSpaces implmentation and IKVM, but I have not found time.

David, if you get some time, try out JavaSpaces and IKVM to make it work with .NET.

Awesome reading

I think the last week or so has yielded some of the best software writing I’ve read since I read the book by the same name pieced together by Joel

Most of these are from the blogs at CodeBetter.com.

James Shore writes an interesting aricle on QWAN, Quality With[out] a Name. Which is an intersting response to the c2 article.

Joel wrote a great article on Development Abstraction.

Jeremy Miller wrote an excellent intro to Six Design Patterns

James Bach destroys Best Practices.

On the more meat and potatoes side of things (code not words?)

Jay Kimble gives a great introduction to XSLT called XSLT for the Uninitiated. I really could have used this a few month ago.
Beginning Xpath and Beginning XSLT are the first two of what will hopefully be a continuing series.

Karl Seguin gives great reasons why not to use string concatenation and why to use string.format instead. I’ve taken what he said to heart and I’ll chastize myself when I type + in C# or & in VB.NET.

John Papa wrote about SCOPE_IDENTITY() and @@IDENTITY. It was very timely information for me because I recently had need to use these, and I rarely do SQL work.

Last night at AADND Tim Landgrave shows us the design of a smart client application which uses the CAB. It was very interesting. He mentioned that they converted/upgrade some 30+ “legacy” applications to use their framework, built on top of the CAB. They did so in a very short period of time, saving the company much time and money.

Overall it has been a great week with much thanks to those bloggers and AADND for keeping me fueled.