Valuable Reading

SQL Query Performance And Data Types

David Totzke — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 15:44:00 GMT

Bruce Johnson of Object Sharp writes about a puzzling performance issue that took a little head-scratching to solve. In the end it came down to a data type mismatch between the parameter variable and the field definition. The parameter was nvarchar(40) and the field was defined as char(36). SQL was converting the field values to nvarchar(40) instead of converting the single parameter value to char(36).

It makes sense that it would convert the char(36) to nvarchar(40) because converting the other way would mean a loss of information not only due to the shorter field length but aslo in the conversion from unicode to single byte character data.

I faced a similar situation some time ago with a join. The join fields were both indexed and of the same data type and yet a query involving the join was very slow. Show plan (it was SQL 6.5) confirmed my suspicion that iterative table scans were happening but coulnd't figure out why. For some reason SQL Server was ignoring the index on the fields. We rebuilt the indexes, removed and re-added the indexes, did an update statistics (again a 6.5 thing) restarted the SQL service to clear caches, removed and recreated the join etc... Nothing had an effect.

After much head banging and hair pulling I discovered that the join fields were indeed of the same data type but of different precision and scale. e.g. FieldA was decimal(8, 4) and FieldB was decimal(8, 2).

Once we corrected the mismatch, the query sprung to life.

Dave
Just because I can...

Bell Labs Holmdel Facility To Be Demolished

David Totzke — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 14:52:00 GMT

Say it isn't so! The Holmdel facility is the birthplace of the cellphone. It was home to the work of several Nobel laureates and was the birthplace of the most important communications technologies in history. And some private real estate company is just going to tear it down.

Via Engadget.

Before the current facility was erected, Harald Friis' work at Holmdel in 1938 produced one of the first microwave communications and RADAR systems, which was utilized by the US in World War II to defend against enemy munitions; Friss also worked closely with Bell Labs scientist Karl Guthe Jansky at Holmdel, who developed there the rotating antenna (aka "Jansky's merry-go-round") and was credited in 1933 with the discovery of the science of radio astronomy. This, in turn, gave birth to the research and work of two later Holmdel scientists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who in 1964 used the Bell Labs' infamous horn antenna (above) to lay the scientific groundwork for a little something we call the "Big Bang Theory" (for which they were jointly awarded 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics).

We could go on about Holmdel's technological contributions, from Linn Mollenauer's groundbreaking work in the development of multimode fiber transmission systems and Andrew Chraplyvy's, Kenneth Walker's, and Robert Tkach's invention of optical fiber for dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) -- some of the technologies which now enable the fiber optic backbone of today's internet infrastructure; to the lab's direct contributions to Telstar, the first communications satellite, which prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send a message of his own into space by way of Holmdel; to Jerry Foschini's BLAST technology (1998), the original precursor to MIMO wireless transmission systems; to Steven Chu's Nobel Prize-winning work in cooling and trapping atoms with lasers; to Arthur Schawlow's and Charles Townes' 1958 invention of the frickin' laser. But somehow we think you get the point.

Now, it seems that the CEO of Preferred Real Estate Inc., Michael G. O'Neill, isn't a bad guy. In this news item listed on Preferred Real Estate Investments website, he does state that they wish to keep the spirit of the area alive and that their proposal won out over about 20 other companies all of whom were interested in “...cutting it up, and covering it over with yet another cookie-cutter community of McMansions”

“McMansions” I love it!

O'Neill's track record seems reassuring. He turned the former American Standard toilet factory in Hamilton, New Jersey into the American Metro Center and filled it with high-quality tenants. In fact, the historic nature of the site along with the pastoral setting is key to O'Neill's strategy for marketing the site to potential tenants of the new facilities.

For now at least, it seems like the good guys have won.

Dave
Just because I can...

InfoQ.com Enterprise Software Development Community Launched

David Totzke — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 12:27:00 GMT

June 8th, 2006. InfoQ.com Enterprise Software Development Community has launched today, having previously been live in testing mode since May 17th. InfoQ is a new Enterprise Software Development news / information community serving the Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA, and Agile communities, with content focused for technical architects, team leads and project managers. InfoQ is the only community in the world serving these communities in one place and is also a technological example of what a modern online information community can be with many new and advanced features. InfoQ's launch has been supported by founding sponsors IBM, BEA, Compuware, Symantec, Cassatt, and Terracotta. Interest in InfoQ since initial initial test release has been high with over 18,300 unique visitors and hundreds of blogs linking to the site.

InfoQ's team of domain expert content committers include well known figures such as Scott Ambler, Obie Fernandez, Deborah Hartmann, Miko Matsumura, Stefan Tilkov, and David Totzke. InfoQ was founded by creator of TheServerSide.com and EJB Design Patterns author Floyd Marinescu, online advertising industry veteran Roxanne Beverstein, and WebWork/TestNG/Magnolia/AspectWerkz committer Alexandru Popescu.

InfoQ is unlike any other online community site, its main differentiators include:

Personalization. InfoQ serves multiple communities while allowing users to select which communities they are interested in, and then personalize even further by excluding specific subtopics/tags. Users personalization settings will then determine what they see on the homepage, and what they will get in their personalized RSS feed, personalized weekly newsletter, etc.
Unique and Exclusive Content. InfoQ publishes daily news written by domain experts, articles, video interviews, video conference presentations selected from major industry conferences, technical case studies, and books.
Innovative technology, user friendly design. InfoQ was designed with the end user in mind, to minimize needless clicks and maximize the user experience with the latest technologies such as AJAX which has been used heavily on the site in areas such as login, discussion threading, content navigation and personalization. InfoQ is not just a site about software development, it is a showcase of what's possible in web development. In addition, InfoQ offers personalized RSS feeds, a new way of interacting with RSS.
Internationalization. InfoQ will in future offer translations of technical articles in Chinese and Brasilian Portuguese, with full internationalization of all site content (including news and threaded discussions) coming in August. InfoQ aims to become a world wide source for new information in Enterprise Software Development.
Localization. InfoQ will in future support posting localized news to allow announcements and content specific to certain regions to be posted to the site, such as InfoQ UK, InfoQ India.

InfoQ is not just a content publisher, it is a community whose specialization is to track and foster change and innovation in the communities served. Each community also has specific social and content goals, some of which are expressed below:

Ruby, led by Obie Fernandez:

We aim to be an essential source for Ruby's adoption in the enterprise, tracking news and issues important to Ruby professionals and informing decision makers that will guide Ruby to mainstream IT adoption.

SOA, led by Miko Matsumura and Stefan Tilkov:

The SOA industry contains a rapidly emerging collection of architects, business leaders, vendors, analysts and developers who are creating a new conversation about Information Technology. The SOA industry is plagued by a scattered collection of blogs and small conferences, but no place for these personalities to call home. The InfoQ SOA community will be the heart of that conversation creating a source to share perspectives, compare notes, understand best practices and combine the knowledge of hands-on SOA implementation with architectural vision needed to drive adoption.

Java, led by Floyd Marinescu:

The Java community has experienced tremendous change in the last 5 years. The lines between commercial and open source are blurring. The very definition of enterprise Java and what design strategies we should use no longer rests with a standard body but with different visions driven from groups like the JCP, Spring, and others. This combines with an even greater concern: the pace of change in Java is slowing. The InfoQ Java community will provide a lens that focuses the community's attention on the innovation that IS occurring in hopes of sparking a flame that will contribute to the better evolution of Java itself.

Agile, led by Deborah Hartmann and Scott Ambler:

Enterprises, bombarded by change, know they've got to get lean to excel. In response, a vast number of process and tooling innovations are coming out of the the Agile community, but who can keep abreast of it all? The InfoQ Agile community will keep readers up-to-date and help the whole enterprise understand how to collaborate for better outcomes. Agile work is by its very nature creative, and creativity needs input - we will draw attention to a wide variety of valuable and emerging ideas, becoming a catalyst for new growth in teams and businesses.

.NET, led by David Totzke:

The Microsoft .NET world is a rapidly changing one and these are exciting times. Our mission is to provide you with information that will enable you to navigate the flood of emerging technologies and information sources and provide a starting point for community discussions. The .NET InfoQ community will be a place where people can come together to explore and define the enterprise development techniques of the future.

Readers can also have their say in InfoQ's content coverage by submitting news. Any content submitted via the 'contribute news' icon above the news portlet will be personally reviewed by InfoQ editorial staff.

Since our launch InfoQ has posted a number of exclusive content items:

Java: A technical casestudy of the Brasilian National Healthcare System
SOA: A history of extended transactions, Evolutionary Integration with ESBs
Agile: Being Agile without going overboard, What is Agility; Why should you care?
Ruby: Ruby and Rails, Asset Management with Ruby DSLs
.NET, Java, SOA: Simple Java and .NET REST Interop
Books: Java Transaction Design Strategies, Domain Driven Design Quickly, VS.NET Tips and Tricks

Today's launch presents version 0.7 of InfoQ. Version numbers are usually used on software projects, not public websites, but InfoQ will be maintaining a version number tied to new features developed for the site as a means to communicate progress to its audience. Launching at version 0.7 means that InfoQ is production ready with most of its core features and content offerings available, but still more exciting features are to come including internationalization, personalized newsletters, and a number of enhancements requested by users.

About The InfoQ.com Enterprise Software Development Community

InfoQ is published by start-up C4Media (Community^4Media), a new company focused on growing InfoQ through a “community of communities, by the community and for the community (hence Community^4)” vision, to become the world's most widely used and influential software development community.

Press Contact:
Floyd Marinescu
416 410 3060
floyd at c4media.com

InfoQ.com - Tracking Change And Innovation In Enterprise Application Development

David Totzke — Wed, 31 May 2006 10:02:00 GMT

I have signed on as the Editor in Chief of the .NET queue at InfoQ.com. InfoQ (information queue) is a new online community that is currently un-launched (Beta is so played) InfoQ is focussed on change and innovation in enterprise software development. InfoQ is being published by C4Media, a company founded by TheServerSide.com creator and EJB Design Patterns author Floyd Marinescu, Roxanne Beverstein, and Webwork committer Alex Popescu.

InfoQ is different from other sites such as The ServerSide in that more than a single community is represented there. The site has extensive profile capabilities so that you can customize your view to only the subjects that interest you. These settings also carry over into the RSS feed. No need to subscribe to multiple feeds on the same site. Set your preferences and they are then reflected in your subscription. Easy.

You can contact me at infoq AT totzke DOT ca if you have an idea for an article you'd like to publish or if you have some news that you'd like us to report.

Please spread the word about InfoQ to help drive awareness of the site and our official "UnLaunch". Try out the site and it's personalization features and let us know what you think.

Dave
Just because I can...

Gabriela Ocampo And The Day Education Died

David Totzke — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 14:11:00 GMT

I spotted a post by Chris Breisch that pointed to this article in the Washington Post by Richard Cohen. It is the story of Gabriela Ocampo and her battle with, of all things, Algebra.

In short:

Last year, she dropped out of the 12th grade at Birmingham High School in Los Angeles after failing algebra six times in six semesters, trying it a seventh time and finally just despairing over ever getting it. So, according to the Los Angeles Times, she "gathered her textbooks, dropped them at the campus book room and, without telling a soul, vanished from Birmingham High School."

Passing a year of Algebra and a year of Geometry is a mandatory requirement to graduate high school in this and many other US school districts. A misguided attempt to close the math and science gap and make the US more competitive. Force it down their throats. Ya, that'll work.

Even more astounding to me than this were some of the comments left on Chris's blog by would be pundits.

Paul Wilson writes:

Wow, I'm speechless too. I've seen plenty of people that don't know how to write or locate things on the map or basic history either, and more than one or two of them have also fared well in this world, so I guess by his reasoning we shouldn't require English, geography, or history either -- and yet he doesn't see that flaw in his own reasoning. :(

Writing is one thing. You can get by without it. The same is true of reading. Try to get by without language at all.

Missing the Sahara Desert by an entire continent is the geographical equivalent of blowing (2 + 2) = 4. Not knowing the capital and chief exports of Uzbekistan, or even where it is, would be on the same level with solving quadratic equations. Let us not forget that Shelly mislocated the Sahara Desert in geography class. Shelly is not a housewife from Topeca. (who more than likely could find the Sahara Desert on a map)

As far as History goes, say it with me everyone, those that do not learn from it, are destined to repeat it.

Richard never said that Algebra should not be required and actually suggests the opposite:

Look, Gabriela, I am not anti-algebra. It has its uses, I suppose, and I think it should be available for people who want to take it. Maybe students should even be compelled to take it, but it should not be a requirement for graduation.

It's the basics that are the most important. Communicating your needs and counting your change are far more important that being able to calculate ballistic trajectory. Hmmm. Maybe that's the key. Algebra, and more specifically quadratic equations, are central to being able to drop something on somebody from a distance. Exactly who is dropping what on whom is an exercise left to the reader.

Tim Doak offers up this glistening pearl:

I hope Gabriela likes working at McDonalds but not as cashier!

I'm not sure it's even worth exposing the flaws in this statement. First, you say this as if it were Gabriela's fault. Have you ever failed at anything despite your best efforts Tim? I'll bet you have. I'm willing to bet that there are tasks in this world that you will never be able to perform. What if we made them mandatory to your continued advancement?

There are worse things that can happen to you than working at McDonalds. There are lots of people that actually enjoy working there. There are many examples of people that have started out working the fry station and gone on to own their own stores. Perhaps Gabriela is one of those people. She is certainly not lacking in drive and determination. She tried to pass algebra seven times! How many of you would have tossed it in sooner? Despite the mantra of parents and teachers that “you can do anything if you just stick with it and don't give up“, not everybody gets to be an astronaut.

Not as cashier? What in the name of Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi does algebra have to do with making change for a Happy Meal?

Not Joking hits the nail on the head:

OK, OK there is one tricky problem that I've never been able to solve, maybe you can help. What are the odds that, given there'll never be enough McDonald's restaurants to contain all the people we think are stupid, that some self-important, deeply naive dweebie will say something like "They should work for McDonald's?"

Well, you've taken us beyond Algebra, through the realm of Probability Theory and into the domain of Statistical Analysis.

Original post time to self-important, deeply naive dweebie saying something like “They should work for McDonalds“. Thirty-two minutes.

I'd say it's a statistical certainty.

Who knows what talents will lie dormant and undiscovered in Gabriela because of the misguided notion that ballistic trajectory is important for everyone. Just what does the US government have planned for the future? Now, the projectile could be something as innocent as a football. According to some though “Violent ground acquisition games such as football are in fact crypto-fascist metaphors for nuclear war.“ Given that the Derek Lutz character was played by Robert Downey Jr., that could just be the drug induced paranoia talking. ;-) Somehow though, I think it hits pretty close to the mark.

Dave
Just because I can...

Don Box and the SOAP vs REST Debate

David Totzke — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 18:45:00 GMT

Posts like this are the reason we all love Don. When asked for his opinion on an internal product debate on REST vs SOAP, Don summed up the salient points quite succinctly and then finished up with the following action points:

If you want a great experience for .NET/Java devs, you’ll typically publish schemas (through wsdl) and support SOAP
If you want a great experience for LAMP folks, you’ll support POX messages and will provide a non-XSD description of your formats
If you want to reach both audiences, you’ll do both #1 and #2
If you want to reach both audiences before your competition does, you'll avoid indulging in religious debates and ship something

Classic.

Dave
Just because I can...

Subversion Open Souce, Source Control

David Totzke — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 14:13:00 GMT

I'm gonna say this up front, so that there's no confusion. I'm NOT against open source. I am, however, against it's use in most corporate environments. My strongest argument for this is that there is no one person or organization that you can hold accountable when something goes pear-shaped. There's no “throat to choke”. A recent bug in Subversion, an open source version control system whose mission is to become a compelling alternative to CVS which itself is an alternative to RCS, PRCS, and Aegis.

The bug stems from an assert in the Subversion server component. Asserts should *never* be in a release build. In fact, the compilers in .NET will remove them automagically from your assemblies in the release builds. There is no mechanism to catch an assert and as such, the program will terminate. I won't delve too far into the philosophy of asserts vs. exceptions but suffice to say that asserts deal with the “correctness“ of a program and exceptions are targetted at “exceptional“ conditions. An assert is a demand that a certain condition be true. There are no maybes or do-overs with assert. If the condition is not met, game over. In the case of Subversion, it takes down Apache.

Any person with write access to any project tree within the entire system can take the system down. This also isn't one of those esoteric bugs that can only be set off by a few rocket scientists. It is triggered by having mismatched case in the path of checked out files and occurs during a merge check-in. Your dog could do it.

Now, here is a very real example of the problem from the comment thread of the bug. I'll only post the most relevant lines below for brevity.

We are rolling out Subversion within our company. This issue is having a recurring, serious impact on our business and eroding confidence in the quality of the Subversion server.

Loss of productivity across the organization isn’t going over well with the folks in charge.

Problem one. The project stakeholders, not having a vendor's throat to choke, have a firm grasp on the development lead's neck.

This assert is exploitable for a digital denial of service (DDoS) attack.

Actually, the first “D“ stands for “Distributed“. DDoS attack involves a distributed “bot“ network of clients that bombard the server with requests and flood the inbound network connection so that legitimate requests cannot get through or overload the server to the point of failure. The issue with Subversion exposes a simple DoS exploit.

We are in the financial software business where security is a very high priority in both our operations as well as our products. Any DDoS exploit, even an internal one, is a very serious security issue.

Problem two. Ok, let me get this straight. Security is a number one priority with you and you chose a free, open source, work-in-progress version control system to safeguard your code? And now you've just told the entire world about it. I would be concerned that an unscrupulous member of the SVC team could add some code to the system to mail home your codebase. I'm not saying that anyone at SVC would do this, but there's a far greater risk of this type of thing happening in the open source world where there can be a certain degree of anonymity for the contributors making it difficult to police.

In response to this persons pleas for an expedient fix to the issue we were offered the following pearls of wisdom:

Nobody is arguing that this is a problem. If it was an easy one to fix it would have been fixed already.

I wonder how loud the outcry would be if Microsoft said something like this. “We're sorry, but this is a really hard problem and we have a headache so you'll just have to wait.“ Ya, that would go over big.

As this is an open source project, you can feel free to attempt to have one of your own developers correct it for you, ...

Ah yes, the old fall back. It's open source so you can fix the bugs yourself. This does however assume that you have the neccessary tools to debug the code and can find the bug. I believe Subversion is written in Java. What if you don't have any Java programmers on staff? Even if you did have a programmer with the skills, can you afford to have them debug somebody else's code that they are not familiar with? It can take a long time to understand even a moderately complex system let alone be able to debug it.

...or if you're so inclined I'm sure that there are numerous developers who you might be able to hire as a contractor to take a look at this particular problem.

Ok, let me get this straight. You want me to *pay* to have this fixed? I thought this was free? How do I go about finding a developer that is competent enough to solve the problem. They would need expereience with the codebase but then what if I get the guy that introduced the bug in the first place? What if he introduces regression errors? It's my neck on the chopping block.

This last bit of wisdom is priceless:

Failing that, the best you can do is wait for the problem to be corrected. Making a big stink about it is more likley to get people irritated than to convince them to volunteer their time and effort to help solve your problem.

For the record, the person posting about this being a huge problem for them wasn't making a “big stink” about it. He made a very cogent and thoughtful plea and even offered some excellent analysis of the problem that he had already done. He pretty much handed them the keys to the problem. In the end, you didn't pay for it so you can just wait until we feel like doing something about it or get bent. Your choice.

Another option, if it's available to you, might be to move your repository to a machine with a case-sensitive filesystem, which would not be vulnerable to this sort of problem.

This particular Subversion bug does not happen on a case-sensitive O/S. It's specific to a Windows environment. What he's saying here is that if we were using a “real” O/S (read Linux) like all of us “1337 h4x0r's” (elite hackers for the uninitiated) then you wouldn't be having a problem.

Having said all of that, I still believe that open source is a Good Thing^tm. The important thing to remember is that you have to be prepared for the risks. Open source projects assume a certain level of technical competence and in-house capability. If you have that, fine. Most projects are constrained for resources to begin with and can ill afford to lose some to a tool that was supposed to make life easier to begin with.

Here endeth the lesson.

Dave
Just because I can...

DOS, Printing and USB Printers

David Totzke — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:52:00 GMT

I wrote an article on printing to a USB printer from DOS on a stand-alone PC more to document it for my own reference than anything else but it's getting hammered by google searchers. It seems that DOS based programs are far from gone and as printers move away from parallel interfaces to USB people are faced with the problem of how to get it to print.

Jonathan just dropped by to say thanks for the tips and left some exellent additional pointers to help out so I thought I would put them up front here so that they are not overlooked.

Thanks so much for posting this information! This was tremendously useful to me.

I have some tips to add that may help people who've had some difficulty with this.

1) Adding the loopback adapter is not necessary if the PC is on any sort of network... even a non-Internet connected LAN. In the case of networked machines, you can merely share the printer, and attach to the printer over 127.0.0.1, as someone else mentioned. For standalone machines, or ones that use dialup, you can either add the loopback adapter exactly as Dave describes, or you can wait until you're dialed into your ISP to print. Standalone machines may give "system error 1231" when you try the "net use lpt1 ..." command, if you're not networked.

2) Setting the shared printer's driver to "TEXT" mode is only required if the application you are using is "dumb" and does not know about specific printers. If your application can be configured for the printer you have, you can leave the setting at "RAW", since the DOS program will have the correct escape codes for the printer.

3) Most personal firewalls will block printer sharing. You need to allow for printer sharing over 127.0.0.1. For Norton Personal Firewall (part of Norton Internet Security), open the configuration window for the firewall. In the "Networking" tab, first choose the proper settings (Home, Away, Office, or Default). Click the "Trusted" tab below, then "Add...". In the window that comes up, make sure "Individually" is selected, and enter "127.0.0.1" as the host to allow. Click "OK" in this window, and "OK" again to leave the Firewall configuration. If you want to allow sharing under different locations, change "Settings for:" in the pull-down menu to and repeat the steps to add 127.0.0.1 as a trusted host. I was getting "system error 66" when trying the "net use lpt1 ..." command until I completed this step.
Other firewalls probably have similar settings to change.

Hope this helps answer a few lingering issues for folks.

Thanks Jonathan! I'm sure that people will find this information invaluable.

Dave
Just because I can...

DirectX 9 In The 2.0 Framework

David Totzke — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 23:01:00 GMT

Over on MSDN Coding4Fun there is an article on beginning DirectX development and they use the old (circa 1980) arcade game Battlezone as the basis for the game. In its time, Battlezone pushed the limits of 3D graphical processing. So much so that the environment was rendered in wire-frame. It is generally considered the first true virtual reality game. These days, you could run it on your phone.

Now, the sample tutorial suggests you use C# Express which targets the 2.0 Framework but they use the version of Managed DirectX for the 1.1 Framework. This isn't a problem as it will all run just fine under 2.0 and MDX for 2.0 is still in Beta. I decided to just use the 2.0 MDX and just convert the code where needed 'cause I'm cool like dat. :)

How hard could it be? Oh. Did I mention I don't know the first thing about DirectX?

One of the first speed bumps you run into is the fact that when you go to reference the two dlls referred to in the tutorial, Microsoft.Directx.dll and Microsoft.Directx.Direct3D.dll, you find that only one of them has a 2.0 Version number. A little investigation soon uncovers the fact that all of the MDX functionality has been consolidated into a single dll. Microsoft.Directx.dll. That's cool.

The next speed bump to appear is that while consolidating they are also cleaning up the namespace. Doing away with overly complex overloads and renaming methods with more explicit names. This is a Good Thing ^TM. A method such as Matrix.PerspectiveFovLH becomes Matrix.PerspectiveFieldOfViewLeftHanded and Caps become Capabilities. Much nicer and a cinch to figure out.

Others require a little more spelunking such as the change from:

int adapterOrdinal = Manager.Adapters.Default;

to:

int adapterOrdinal = AdapterCollection.Default.Adapter;

Then there's this one:

device.DrawUserPrimitives(PrimitiveType.LineStrip, 6, CreateCrossHairVertexArrayTop());

The CreateCrossHairVertexArrayTop function returns a Microsoft.DirectX.Direct3D.CustomVertex.PositionColored[] err...thing and the 2.0 DrawUserPrimitives wants a GraphicsBuffer ummm...do-dad.

I am so screwed.

The MDX documentation for 2.0 is sparse and digging into it often leads you to what is obviously 1.1 documentation. After a little searching I found a link to Glenn Wilson over at Inner Realm who posted this little gem. It's a base application employing the Microsoft provided framework for MDX that he's packaged up into a Visual Studio Community Content Installer File. Uzip it, run it and then you're only a File --> New -- Project away from MDX goodness.

THANKS Glenn with two n's!!

Dave
Just because I can...(thanks to Glenn that is)

Academic .NET Radio Is On The Air

David Totzke — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 23:52:00 GMT

Matthew Cassell, at 15 years old, is the youngest member of my user group here in Kitchener. He's also one of the most active. He's recently put together a podcast that will focus on .NET development as it relates to the academic space. High school in particular.

Don't let the audience demographic fool you. Matt has some great stuff already in the can, as it were, including an interview with Java/.NET congnoscente Ted Neward and Mono project caballero César López Natarén.

You can download the episodes over on the website at www.academicdotnet.com . Matt's even set up RSS 1 and 2 feed support so you can subscribe.

You need to check this out now.

Dave
Just because I can...(well, get going!)