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399 days ago

Why isn't this getting more attention? http://referencesource.microsoft.com/netframework.aspx Maybe I'm just out of it...

On using namespace std, dealing with "Microsoft.VS80.DebugCRT could not be found" and resolving the ...

607 days ago

This one was odd. I had a VS2005 C++/CLI project, and in a recent iteration, had added some logging code using the standard library's streams package. One of the things I noticed early, by way of the program absolutely failing to get off the ground and writing an SxS exception to the system event log, was that including the standard library in the default Debug configuration resulted in the program acquiring a dependency on the Debug MSVCRT DLLs. I had been using the release DLLs (via compiler switch /MD) since I didn't want the hassle of having to make sure the non-redistributed Debug DLLs were on the build server and test machines, etc. Having weighed whether it was worth it for getting to include std, I decided it was, and made it a requirement to have the 4 required files (the 3 runtime DLLs and one manifest file) in the target dir at the build server and test machines. That solved the SxS error (Dependent Assembly Microsoft.VC80.DebugCRT could not be found... Last Error was ...

SQL Server double pipe string concatenation issue update

715 days ago

The request to bring the ANSI SQL standard double pipe (" ") operator for string concatenation to SQL Server has gotten some response from MS. It is mostly positive, seeing as I never harbored hope for it to make it into Katmai SQL Server 2008. "Michael" left it active and noted the large-ish number of votes for the issue. He mentions that SQL Server uses the "+" operator for string concatenation - yes, we know, and we loathe it. Everyone else uses the double pipe, except, as I've noted, MySql, which makes, with SQL Server, and interesting pair. Vote now, if you haven't, so we can hope for SQL Server 2008 SP1!

Do sales/marketing folks fall into the trap of convention more easily than anyone else?

806 days ago

When you see enough advertisement, you see patterns emerge. Someone does something which is pretty creative in order to help their message, and thus their product, stand out; soon it's showing up everywhere as others copy it, looking for the same freshness and appeal. After a while, certain designs or phrases become almost an institution in their own right: "new and improved", "this weekend only", "no payments until January 2008". I don't really hear these phrases anymore, and almost missed even thinking about what they might mean. For example, I heard the "no payments..." one since I was a kid, when I had no clue what a payment was. So, I didn't think about it until more recently, when I finally understood what they were trying to tell me (and trying not to tell me, like you still have to pay the interest on those months you aren't paying, fool). Did the constant repetition make it invisible or did it finally do it's job and get me to listen? ...

VS 2005 debugger watch gets a bit lost in the stack when chaining IEnumerable instances

808 days ago

In the spirit of deferring execution to the last possible minute, which on .Net means using IEnumerable and in C# 2.0 the yield keyword, I've built a graphics rendering engine which returns rendered objects as an IEnumerable stream. The interface to this engine allows access to an IEnumerable of the rendered objects, which in turn delegates to an object-specific renderer, which in turn delegates to a graphics-system specific renderer. All each one does is to return an IEnumerable to the client object, and defers rendering or otherwise doing computation until the enumeration is iterated. Then it processes each object in turn. This is a nice way to stream computation, since the cost of computation is amortized over each object from the beginning, and each additional one is a marginal, predictable cost, rather than having a huge cost for the first object and then a diminishing cost for subsequent ones. Ad-hoc decision making during the streaming, such as a decision to cancel, is ...