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A good discussion on this topic can be found at this blog entry: Don't use stored procedures yet? Must be suffering from NIHS (Not Invented Here Syndrome). The content of the blog post (by Rob Howard, a former Microsoft employee who most definitely knows his stuff) is definitely a good read, but the real gems are in the comments, which there are plenty. There's an equally interesting thread on this discussion by another blogger with his entry called Stored Procedures are Bad, M'Kay?. Both worth reading, if nothing else for the comments.

A good discussion on this topic can be found at this blog entry: Don't use stored procedures yet? Must be suffering from NIHS (Not Invented Here Syndrome). The content of the blog post (by Rob Howard, a former Microsoft employee who most definitely knows his stuff) is definitely a good read, but the real gems are in the comments, which there are plenty. There's an equally interesting thread on this discussion by another blogger with his entry called Stored Procedures are Bad, M'Kay?. Both worth reading, if nothing else for the comments.

A good discussion on this topic can be found at this blog entry: Don't use stored procedures yet? Must be suffering from NIHS (Not Invented Here Syndrome). The content of the blog post (by Rob Howard, a former Microsoft employee who most definitely knows his stuff) is definitely a good read, but the real gems are in the comments, which there are plenty. There's an equally interesting thread on this discussion by another blogger with his entry called Stored Procedures are Bad, M'Kay?. Both worth reading, if nothing else for the comments.

Here is an article about unkillable processes, and why.

Actually, if you are changing a property that is common to all selected controls, such as the BackColor, you can select multiple controls, and the Properties window will display just those properties that are common to the selected controls. At least you can do this in VS.NET 2003.

I agree that the code-behind model leaves a lot to be desired. It is a hack, really, and despite the fact that MS has touted it as a clean separation of code and content, it's there solely because they could not get VS.NET to work any other way. With Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0, the code-behind model, while still available, will likely be left behind for the code-beside approach.

You can read more about code-behind's hackiness at this blog entry. There's also a good blog entry on the same topic by Andy Smith.

Actually, if you are changing a property that is common to all selected controls, such as the BackColor, you can select multiple controls, and the Properties window will display just those properties that are common to the selected controls. At least you can do this in VS.NET 2003.

I agree that the code-behind model leaves a lot to be desired. It is a hack, really, and despite the fact that MS has touted it as a clean separation of code and content, it's there solely because they could not get VS.NET to work any other way. With Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0, the code-behind model, while still available, will likely be left behind for the code-beside approach.

You can read more about code-behind's hackiness at this blog entry. There's also a good blog entry on the same topic by Andy Smith.

Actually, for ASP.NET development, you should use ASP.NET WebMatrix. SharpDevelop is more suited towards app development than web development.

http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/

You might want to look at WebMatrix, which Microsoft offers for free.

http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/

SharpDevelop is designed for application development because WebMatrix works so well already.

If you're just doing ASP.NET and want a free IDE, Microsoft has WebMatrix.

• ASP.NET does all DB interaction through ODBC (it can, but it also has native drivers)
• ASP.NET is slower/less efficient (pointless statement without evidence)
• ASP.NET is more expensive than PHP (they are both freely downloads)
• ASP.NET platform is more expensive (kinda. both work on Windows - PHP also works on more expensive Unices (so can we say PHP's platform is more expensive?) - PHP works on Linux, ASP.NET can kinda work on Linux if you count Mono)
• ASP.NET is less secure because it requires IIS. Absolutely false! ASP.NET has no dependence on IIS. It just happens to be the default web server on Windows. You are free to write your own web server to host ASP.NET. An example to get you started.
• VB.NET is the "default" .NET language? That statement doesn't make any sense.

The author completely ignored one of ASP.NET's greatest advantages - it is an abstraction from writing HTML (which I guess they think makes it inefficient, just like C is less efficient than machine language). When I write:
TextBox t = new TextBox();
t.Text = "Hello World";
I do not know, nor care, what actual markup will be returned to the client. Before you start worrying that you need absolute control - consider the problem of delivering to multiple browsers/devices. ASP.NET will render different markup, depending on the browsers capabilities. When browsing from a PDA or phone, it will render appropriate markup. Does PHP do that?

as far as ASP.Net is concerned, I'd recommend www.asp.net as a starter site, along with w3schools' asp.net section for a reference/overview.

I'll add another namedrop for MSDN though, and point you to the .net Class Library reference

Well take a look here and see the blog of a windows developer. He really does get upset when people say that MS doesn't care about security.
I am sure you are all aware that windows is a fairly large OS that is designed to be easy to use for novices but allow Power Users to do their thing as well. I think it accomplishes that fairly well. They provide automatic updates to every computer now (if you are not too lazy to turn it on). I realize that this option is turned off by default but this is more because of the people (*cough* slashdotters *cough*) that say that MS will somehow steal all their secrets if you let them install updates automatically. I think MS does a good job updating system.


Also, if I see one more reply to an IE article with the line "Download the patch here" rated as "Funny", I will kill myself.

If you know the Base Class Library well enough to carefully avoid any Framework 2.0 features, and the language you choose well enough to avoid using, for example, Generics in C#/VB.net, you might be able to use the new Express IDEs to write code that would compile with the 1.0 or 1.1 compilers. You'd have to tweak the manifests to target the 1.0 or 1.1 framework before compiling as well. The compiler would be a lesser issue in terms of legal distribution compared to the Framework, ISTM.

It might just work, but it seems rather a faff. If you're looking to use C# price-free with an IDE, SharpDevelop seems like a better option for now. Or, for web apps, there's a thing called Web Matrix available at asp.net which is price-free and fits on a floppy, if you remember those things.

Like all things on the internet you need to seperate the signal from the noise. For a really informative blog along these lines check out this or that or this.

Like all things on the internet you need to seperate the signal from the noise. For a really informative blog along these lines check out this or that or this.

Like all things on the internet you need to seperate the signal from the noise. For a really informative blog along these lines check out this or that or this.

And yes, Microsoft is partially to blame because they made an architectural and business choice only to be in control of a small set of essential drivers. Linus on the other hand wants drivers in his tree.

Linus' central control results in him (or his lieutenants) having the ability to throw code back at the driver developer and laugh at them cruely until they fix it.

It's a pain in the ass to use third party drivers. Having them in the kernel makes my life easier, and it increases the quality of the code because the kernel maintainer community have high standards.

Furthermore the architectural choice of using the GPL for Linux means that if there are bugs in drivers anyone with an appropriate clue can fix them. In the Windows world this is not possible.

It's not about blaming Microsoft or Windows, or Linux for that matter. Well, not just that. It's about what system is more stable.

Excerpt:
A certain software company decided that it was too hard to take the coordinates of the NM_DBLCLK notification and hit-test it against the treeview to see what was double-clicked. So instead, they take the address of the NMHDR structure passed to the notification, add 60 to it, and dereference a DWORD at that address. If it's zero, they do one thing, and if it's nonzero they do some other thing.

It so happens that the NMHDR is allocated on the stack, so this program is reaching up into the stack and grabbing the value of some local variable (which happens to be two frames up the stack!) and using it to control their logic.

For Windows 2000, we upgraded the compiler to a version which did a better job of reordering and re-using local variables, and now the program couldn't find the local variable it wanted and stopped working.

I got tagged to investigate and fix this. I had to create a special NMHDR structure that "looked like" the stack the program wanted to see and pass that special "fake stack".

I think this one took me two days to figure out.

who doesn't know of the socket handle leak that MS can't fix because otherwise they'd break 1000's of apps

My sympathy levels for Microsoft engineers skyrocketted after reading this and this, detailing the horrors they have to deal with in the name of compatability.

who doesn't know of the socket handle leak that MS can't fix because otherwise they'd break 1000's of apps

My sympathy levels for Microsoft engineers skyrocketted after reading this and this, detailing the horrors they have to deal with in the name of compatability.

"Mac Word 6.0 was a crappy product," admitted Microsoft Mac programmer Rick Schaut on his blog. "And we spent some time trying to figure out how not to do that again."

so, does anyone know where the blogs are for the XP programmers?

or do you just hate the paper clip?

The funny thing about Safari is that it "remembers" favorite icons better than IE (sometimes IE just turns things back to the regular icon). I thought favorite icons were an IE invention

The funny thing about Safari is that it "remembers" favorite icons better than IE (sometimes IE just turns things back to the regular icon). I thought favorite icons were an IE invention

1) Open-source. I like to know what my software is doing, and if it lacks some desired functionality, I want to be able to add it. Additionally, this is a matter of trust and privacy. Open-source software helps ensure software makers are competing fairly). Open-source software will rarely, if ever, report web browsing, word processing, or media viewing habits back to 'home base', at least without asking you first. And if they do, there's a great chance someone will notice and speak up (usually very loudly).

2) Security. I don't think I need to say much about this because the inadequacies of Windows, with regards to security and the sometimes unacceptably long invterval of finding a critical bug and patching it, are very well documented. Also, I'm a big fan of security by peer review of source code.

3) Stability. Windows was grossly unstable until Windows 2000 was released. Anyone that's been subjected to using Windows 95/98 should know exactly what I'm talking about, and systems administrators should know well enough the bizarre rituals and alchemies involved in convincing an NT 4.0 server to stay up for even months at a time.

I've been enjoying a stable computing environment since I switched to Linux in 1996. I reboot only after building a new kernel or on the (very) rare occasion that the nVidia module panics the kernel. I've also been using the same Debian installation for the last four years.

(Ironically, though persons who are pro-Microsoft compain that Windows XP still has major stability problems, I've been using it daily on my roommate's laptop for a few months now and the only noticable problem is that sometimes it doesn't like to shut down properly.)

4) Choice. For example, there are scores of open-source window managers that run on Linux and free BSDs, and some of these have eye candy and features still not available in Windows. There are hundreds of third-party extensions and applets for these window managers. There are numerous distributions of Linux and BSD that all have different benefits and shortcomings, sometimes aiming to solve different niche problems. And the best part is that they can all take advantage of each others' contributions - no lock-in. The list goes on and on.

5) Unix. Unix is a well-designed, modular system that is still heavily used thirty years after its inception. And it is thoroughly defined in open, public standards. I've come to be addicted to this system; I'd simply go mad if I were restricted to the DOS command line (though I hear Microsoft is attempting improvements in this area).

Just to name a few...

- Nick

You can grow a business to the extent that there is "friction" in the marketplace that makes it not worthwhile to clone your product and business (say, to $100,000). But if your business grew to a significant size (say, $1 million) then someone else will come along, covet that money, and use your source to kick start a clone of your business. This is true in hardware as we all know (all the cheap knockoffs you see of original products), and the friction costs are higher in most cases for hardware. If for example you make an open source accounting app that starts to do well, I can take that source, study it, and start selling and supporting it for less than you offer it, and we can have a price war until we're both paupers, or one quits. Even better, as you make improvements, I get to incorporate them in my product as well, so you can't really stay ahead of me for any length of time.

Windows seems to be going down the road of "show fewer things but with bigger pictures", which may be great for regular folkum. Advanced users will just scrap the bells and whistles anyway for a basic, functional setup. "Dumbing down" through simplification isn't always a bad thing though. I actually like the new WinXP start menu a lot better than the classic one, albeit with small icons instead of the huge default setting. Silver Luna isn't too bad either, as long as I reduce the size of the titlebars and buttons to classic size. Again, what's the deal with Microsoft and huge buttons and icons? Are they trying to cater to the bad eyesight but too cool to wear glasses crowd?

"...Process repeats itself at Step 1 and continues in perpetuity unless the user is fast enough to be able to close the actual browser window before the plugin pops up, or until the user consents, or unless the user shuts down Internet Explorer."

There is a free ASP.NET Web Development Tool. Though it is only good for ASP.Net and not GUI development with .Net.

Free, full featured IDE from.....MS

Being able to use the framework without having to buy vs.net or use iis would be neat

The SDK for the framework (aka, compilers and VM) are available free of charge from the ASP .Net web site. VS .Net is really just a (rather good) IDE with excellent support for the MS compilers.

one way, executable bits for the stack and heap:

http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2003/11 /04/55560.aspx
http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20020826013 453&mode=flat

With the right backup/recovery tools, W2K+ is a highly productive desktop.

Spacemonger - great application of that tile-graphing technique (whose name escapes me). PowerDesk has a size manager that uses horizontal bars.

Unison - been looking for this for years. Thanks!

Visio is so impressive, especially the manufacturer-specific symbols. WhiteHorse is vapor, but wow. MindManager is also good.

If you like Palm Desktop, you should try Ecco Pro. It has native Palm support, live sync between multiple PCs, double click to launch URLs and a powerful data model. Support stopped 7 years ago, but it works great except for a hard limit of 32K items in a single file (which takes years to hit, then you need to archive older calendar entries into a separate file).

The best Microsoft employee blog is the Old New Thing. I don't think you'd get far arguing your anti-Microsoft points with Raymond.

Korby Parnell (works for Microsoft writing Visual SourceSafe tech docs) replied to this very question in his blog comments. Here is his response: "As far as I know, Microsoft does not have an 'official' SCM product. I can't speak for all teams, of course, but my team uses Visual SourceSafe for source control."

Korby Parnell (works for Microsoft writing Visual SourceSafe tech docs) replied to this very question in his blog comments. Here is his response: "As far as I know, Microsoft does not have an 'official' SCM product. I can't speak for all teams, of course, but my team uses Visual SourceSafe for source control."

• Don Box, Indigo
• Chris Anderson, Avalon
• Rico Mariani, Performance
• Brad Abrams, Class Libraries
• Chris Brumme, CLR
• Raymond Chen, win32 guru
• Chris Sells, MSDN strategist
• Andy Pennell, Debugger

• Don Box, Indigo
• Chris Anderson, Avalon
• Rico Mariani, Performance
• Brad Abrams, Class Libraries
• Chris Brumme, CLR
• Raymond Chen, win32 guru
• Chris Sells, MSDN strategist
• Andy Pennell, Debugger

No. Isn't the CPL a viral licence??

The real info can be found at the programmers weblog ....

Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset has released as Open Source on SourceForge.net

He's the one behind the SourceForge release. Here's the part on the idea behind, from his release comments

Now, let's talk about why WiX was released as Open Source. First, working on WiX has never been a part of my job description or review goals. I work on the project in my free time. Second, WiX is a very developer oriented project and thus providing source code access increases the pool of available developers. Today, there are five core developers (Robert, K, Reid, and Derek, thank you!) regularly working on WiX in their free time with another ten submitting fixes occasionally. Finally, many parts of the Open Source development process appeal to me. Back in 1999 and 2000, I did not feel that many people inside Microsoft understood what the Open Source community was really about and I wanted to improve that understanding by providing an example.

After four and a half years of part-time development, the WiX design (and most of the code) matured to a point where I was comfortable trying to release it externally. So, last October I started looking for a means to release not only the tools but the source code as well. I thought GotDotNet was the place. However, at that time, none of the existing Shared Source licenses were flexible enough to accept contributions from the community. Then, in February, I was introduced to Stephen Walli who was also working to improve Microsoft's relationship with the Open Source community. Fortunately, Stephen was much farther along than I and had the step-by-step plan how to release an Open Source project from Microsoft using an approved OSS license.

Today, via WiX on SourceForge, you get to see the results of many people's efforts to improve Microsoft from the inside out. I'm not exactly sure what is going to happen next but I'm sure there are quite a few people who are interested to see where this leads. Personally, all I hope is that if you find the WiX toolset useful then you'll join the community and help us improve the toolset.

And give some credit.

Listen I just copy and pasted the HTML from the place that I got the original post from. If you have a problem with all the link go talk to the original poster.

Actually, there are a couple of free IDE's for the .Net world.

Microsoft offers a *FREE* ASP.Net development IDE called ASP.NET Matrix available at www.ASP.Net. It's geared towards code writing, so you don't get a great WYSIWYG HTML tool, but you can do some pretty cool stuff with it.

For a Windows Form IDE, look at SharpDevelop which is currently in Beta release .99b :-). It's open source (GPL) so if it doesn't work, you can fix it. I haven't looked at this one in a little while (beta .95), but it looks like the development team is rolling right along, and in fact, I'll probably download a copy of it today for evaluation. I'm a VS user, but actually write *a lot* of C# test code fragments in TextPad.

I'm sure there are others, but I've actually used those two IDE's (well, three if you count TextPad :-) and would recommend them.

IE is so good at crashing, you just have to tell it to do it and it will.
Crash IE with a single INPUT tag

Check out Raymond Chen's blog, especially the History category. There are some gems in there, like Why 16-bit DOS and Windows Apps are Still With Us and Hardware Backwards Compatability.

Check out Raymond Chen's blog, especially the History category. There are some gems in there, like Why 16-bit DOS and Windows Apps are Still With Us and Hardware Backwards Compatability.

Check out Raymond Chen's blog, especially the History category. There are some gems in there, like Why 16-bit DOS and Windows Apps are Still With Us and Hardware Backwards Compatability.

Check out Raymond Chen's blog, especially the History category. There are some gems in there, like Why 16-bit DOS and Windows Apps are Still With Us and Hardware Backwards Compatability.

Jalindi Igloo, CVS SCC plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio and other compliant IDEs
CVSIn, CVS Integration Add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio
CVS SCC proxy is the SCC API plug-in which provides access from practically all Microsoft SCC enabled software to the general CVS repositories.

I don't know how well any of them work, one page asserts that igloo is crap and the SCC proxy is the holy grail. I have no idea if any of this is true, just googling a litle.

Quoting from the article linked below:

Starting with Windows XP Service Pack 2, on processors which support it (according to the web page, currently AMD K8, Itanium, and AMD64), the stack and heap will not be executable. If you try to execute the stack or the heap, an exception will be raised and the code will not execute. In other words, execute page protection will soon be enforced, now that processors exist that support it. (Actually, I believe Windows XP for Itanium already used this new protection level, so those of you who have been playing around with your Itanium may have seen this already.)

If you were a good developer and followed the rules on page protections, then this has no effect on you. But if you cheated the rules and took advantage of specific hardware implementation details, you may find yourself in trouble. Consider yourselves warned.

posted on Tuesday, November 04, 2003 3:38 AM

http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2003/11 /04/55560.aspx