Someday, I am going to own one of Daryl's phenomenal pastels. Until then, at least I can share them with others via my blog. Here is her website. For now I have some postcards and a pin!

Got Speech? Developing Applications using Microsoft Speech Server and .NET

Registration is open!

Thom Robbins announced the winners of the Will Code for Device contest and then posted individual blog posts describing each of the winning applications and screen shots of them.

If you browse to his list of blog posts for December you can see each of the winning apps.

Poor Robert has taken such a beating this week, but this really is funny!

This story was on NPR (MarketPlace) last night.

Oh good. Now I can take all of those caveats out of my Whidbey BCL presentation!

This is a big deal. Peter Drayton explains why and the impact of this on language developers in this blog post.

Good work, folks!

(of course, if you used Smalltalk..... as per James Robertson)

Posted from BLInk!

I guess it would be fun to rewrite the VTdotNET application from scratch. That was my first ASP.NET applicaiton and learning playground,so I think it's only fitting. Heck. I can even have a user login now.

Sahil asks a good question (something I meant to share...thanks for the reminder) about installing the November CTP bits on a machine that already has SQL Server 2005 (Beta 2) on it.

The latest install put SQL 2005 Express on my machine without asking me. I already had SQL 2005 Beta 2 (Oct. CTP) on there. All of my vs.net tests against the SQL Server database continued to function perfectly. However, I cannot open up a connection in the SQL Server Management Studio.It is looking for a method that no longer exists in the Windows.Forms namespace (cool to see that tie to managed code...). Hmm - a few more dialogs I try to open also have similar issues with the

So I'll probably get the December CTP of SQL Server to see. I'm sure it's working with something! I clearly missed a piece of information somewhere about that. And I can't quite answer your question, yet, Sahil. Sorry. 

Here are some more changes upcoming for the November CTP that I found loading up a project from the October CTP bits:

retyping for Google, etc

System.Transactions.TransactionScope.Consistent is being replaced by Transaction.Scope.Complete

LoadOption.UpdateCurrentValues (used with DataSet/DataTable.Load(dbDataReader)) is changing to the very strange LoadOption.Upsert. Additionally, LoadOption.OverwriteRow is replaced by OverwriteChanges and PreserveCurrentValues is replaced by PreserveChanges.

Lastly, System.Windows.Forms.AutoScaleBaseSize is deprecated. This was automatically created by the Windows form designer as you began dropping controls onto the design surface.

eg:   Me.AutoScaleBaseSize = New System.Drawing.Size(5, 13)

Now, I see these two lines being created instead:

 Me.AutoScaleDimensions = New System.Drawing.SizeF(6.0!, 13.0!)
 Me.AutoScaleMode = System.Windows.Forms.AutoScaleMode.Font

All of this stuff will get helpfully pointed out by VS2005.

UpdateBatch has been dramatically changed with the current bits (41129) of VS2005. Here are the details on that.

Now that we can exceed the 2100 parameter limit I have been doing some experiments with a 10000 record query from a 104,000 record table and doing batch updates in big chunks. It will be important to tune your batch updates based on the system - location of sql server relative to the application, latency, etc etc. Here is what I hit today when working against a hardwired remote sql server 2000.

Interesting....

Modifying the new CommandTimeout property (from default of 10 to 60) on the DataAdapter's SelectCommand, fixed this problem. Then I had to change it again for a batch of 10,000. I just popped it up to 120 and that did the trick.

What's going on of course is that ado.net is building some big goo up front. Prior to this version, it built one big fat query to accomodate the entire batch. But that's where they quickly (very quickly) hit the 2100 parameter limit. Now watching profiler, it is getting run one update (one row) at a time. I wish I could watch what happens in between, but, really, that's okay! Can't geek out too much.

This is the kind of fun you can have on a beautiful winter day with a broken foot.

A few days ago I noticed that GetDataReader had an obsolete stamp all over it in the online docs. Jackie Goldstein as well as Kawarjit Bedi (from the ADO.NET team) let me know it was just because the name was being changed. I found this warning in the latest bits (November CTP) to be much less alarming than the "obsolete" stamp!