By Marc Farley 3 stars (out of 5) This book is a broad overview of all things related to data storage: how disk drives work how file systems and drivers use disk drives direct attached storage (local disk drive) SCSI RAID NAS (network attached storage) SAN (storage area network) backups and tape technologies With this much territory to cover, the author had to choose between writing an encyclopedia and keeping things high level. He opted for high level. The book is a good way to get started with...

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The recommended way to create XML readers and writers has changed from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0. In .NET 1.1, you use the new operator to create an instance of XmlTextReader or XmlTextWriter. In .NET 2.0, you use the Create function of XmlReader or XmlWriter to create instances. This is more than simply a different way of coding things; the reader/writer you get in 2.0 behaves differently than its 1.1 version. For example, the following 1.1 code, while it compiles, does not work correctly:using System;...

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An upgrade from WebSphere MQ 5.3 to WebSphere MQ 6.0 on Windows goes fairly smooth. You can run the installer to do an in place upgrade. Here are the things to watch out for: You'll probably need to install Eclipse. Don't get Eclipse from the Eclipse web site; use IBM's installer which sets up Eclipse to work with WebSphere MQ. To install Eclipse, click on Software Requirements on the installer launch pad. Then expand the Eclipse node, where you'll find buttons for installing Eclipse. WebSphere MQ...

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By Chris Sells & Michael Weinhardt 5 stars (out of 5) The basics of Windows forms programming are fairly obvious. You drag controls from the toolbox onto the design surface, set the properties as necessary, and wire code to the events. For simple apps this is all you need to know and you typically don't need to bother with the documentation. Fortunately for us, Microsoft didn't stop with the obvious. This books contains excellent coverage of many advanced topics, including: the form lifecycle...

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WebSphere MQ is IBM's message queuing product. The messages it sends and receives have 2 parts: a fixed format header and a free form body. JMS is the Java package that creates a standard interface to abstract messaging. All the JMS programmer knows is that he's talking to some sort of messaging system (such as WebSphere MQ) behind JMS. One of the features of JMS is the properties collection. This is a collection of meta-data name/value pairs used to describe the message. The properties collection...

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In Visual Studio 2003, if you wanted to return a node set from managed code to XSLT using an XSLT extension function, you had to use a hack invented by Oleg Tkachenko (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/l... If At First You Don't Succeed section). Visual Studio 2005 corrects the situation that made the hack necessary, but now the hack no longer works! To return a node set to XSLT from managed code, you need to create a class derived from the abstract class XPathNodeIterator....

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When you upgrade a C++ project from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2005, the conversion may decide to add the /Zl (upper case Z, lower case L) option to the compiler command line. This appears in the project properties at Configuration Properties -> C/C++ -> Command Line in the text box on the right. The result of this can be that the link fails with: error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "?.cctor@@$$FYMXXZ" (?.cctor@@$$FYMXXZ) The solution is simply to remove /Zl from the text box....

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In Visual Studio 2005 C++, functions that previously took a variable declared as const no longer do so. For example, the following compiles using Visual Studio 2003: const __wchar_t __pin *strPrinterName = ::PtrToStringChars(printerN... BOOL result = ::OpenPrinter(strPrinterName, mJobHandle, NULL); But, with Visual Studio 2005 results in: error C2664: 'OpenPrinterW' : cannot convert parameter 1 from 'const wchar_t __pin *' to 'LPWSTR'Conversion loses qualifiers To get around this, you need to explicitly...

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I've been working to upgrade a complex project to Visual Studio 2005 and, not surprisingly, there are gotchas. This is the first post in a series about the the things I've run into. We'll start off with an easy one. In C++, the pow function (raise number to a power) has lost one of its signatures, pow(int, int). The fix is to cast the first argument to a double, float, or long double. Thus, pow(2, 2) becomes pow((float) 2, 2) or pow(2.0f, 2). The compiler error you'll receive when you try to use...

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