SQL Server 2008 R2 Install

Now that it’s gone to RTM I’ve just updated my development server to SQL Server 2008 R2 and hit an error that is a little weird.

The install was blocked because it thought I had the SQL Server 2005 Express Tools installed.  However this is a machine that has never had anything other that SQL Server 2008 on it.

Searching around on the internet I found a post on the sqldabtips.com blog that covered why this is the case. 

Basically the problem is that SQL Prompt and SQL Search from RedGate add a registry key (at least the version of SQL Search that I had installed did) that fools the installer.  Simply uninstalling SQL Search and hitting “re-run” in the SQL Server 2008 R2 installer solved the problem and allowed the upgrade to be applied.

Page.Title Strangeness

It’s very late and I’m madly trying to get a release out to the client so that I can go home (and have food as I’ve also not had lunch as well) and came across a rather strange problem in ASP.NET.

When trying to set the title of the page in code using a line very similar to the following:

Page.Title = "My new page";

It was ignoring it completely. Even setting the value in the watch window when debugging wouldn’t change the value of the Title property.

After a fruitless twenty minutes or so I spotted what the problem was. It was set in the mark-up to an empty string:

<%@ Page Language="C#" Title="" %>

And this stopped it being set in the code behind. Rather mental! Especially if you do the following:

<%@ Page Language="C#" Title="My page" %> 

When in this case it’s actually set correctly in the code-behind, overriding what is in the mark-up.

NEBytes – March 2010

The details of the March NEBytes event are up on the events page.  “Visual Studio 2010” with Richard Fennell and “System Centre in the R2 Wave” with Matt McSpirit.

Hopefully the turnout at this one will be a little better than the last one (56 registered, 23 attended).  Registration opened yesterday morning and, at present, we have 26 attendees.  There’s plenty more space so get over there and register!

ASP.NET 4.0 Cometh

For all of you who are looking forward to VS2010 (after playing with BETA 2 and the RC I know I am) my good friend Dan Maharry is putting together a series of posts covering ASP.NET 4.0 that make pretty good reading.

SQL Server Table-Valued Functions Funny

Putting it here so that I have it somewhere that I can remember. Stored procedures and table-valued functions in SQL Server 2008 (I don’t know if this applies to earlier versions as I’ve not checked) behave slightly differently when using a view as their data source.

I have a view called cb_ClientView that does some jiggery-pokery to return the results that I need across several tables. It’s used in several places so that I don’t have to repeat the code several times.

Now I have both a stored procedure and a table-valued function that return data from the view. In both cases the SQL to utilise the view is pretty simple:

SELECT *
FROM cb_ClientView
WHERE @ShowEdited=1 OR cb_ClientView.IsEdited=0

Now I know that I should specify the exact columns that I want to return and not use the wildcard for columns but this method allows me to change the view to return other bits of data without having to modify all the stored procedures that use the code.

Which is exactly what I had to do. However this doesn’t work if you have a function!

Running the table-valued function still uses the old view definition. Unless you open the function in SQL Server Management Studio and run the statement, effectively altering the function, to be exactly what it was in the first place.

Seems a little inconsistent to me!

NEBytes - February 2010

The details of the February NEBytes event are up on the events page. Dynamic Consumption in C# 4.0 with Oliver Sturm and a Direct Access talk by Dan Oliver and Conrad Sidey.

We've got a bigger room this time (in a different building as well just to confuse you). It would be good to see you there.

The year in review

I’ve tried for several years to write a review of the previous year just to try and put a little perspective on what’s gone on. I’ve never really gotten round to it (or more correctly I’ve started but never finished). However this time I managed to craft together a “year-in-review” whilst away diving at New Year. It's just taken me a month to get it up here!

Diving

Diving seems to be the main theme of the year. The year started with a New Year’s Day with a dive on the Thistlegorm off a day-boat (after not much sleep due to a very rowdy bunch of Russian’s in the hotel from hell) – the only saving grace was that I helped with the tie off dive and was the first person on the boat to touch the wreck in 2009 – I even beat the dive leader down. The end of the year was equally as good with a dive on the Thistlegorm again on New Year’s Eve. Thankfully this time on a live-aboard which is a much more pleasant way to do it.

In between I did an awful lot of diving.

I qualified as a Divemaster with Sunderland Scuba Centre in February and lots of thanks to Steve Gibson and Jonathan Bray who made it enjoyable yet challenging and rewarding all at the same time.

Shortly after that I took a three month sabbatical from work (more on that below!) to do some diving and travelling in South East Asia. Spending two months on Koh Tao diving with Buddha View I decided to complete the instructor course and at the end of April I became an Open Water Scuba Instructor (as well as an EFR Instructor, Enriched Air Instructor, and Emergency Oxygen Provider Instructor). It wasn’t something I planned to do but it was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done. Not only is Koh Tao a fantastic place to dive but Mark Soworko, Darius Moazzami and Gannon Murphy make a very good instructing team. It also helped that I had a great group of people on the IDC as well – John, Marie, Helen, Ewan, Nicola, Rob, Niki, Sascha, and Tom.

The only problem is that I’m (a) not diving enough back in the UK and (b) not teaching!

Travelling

As well as the time in Koh Tao I also did a month of travelling whilst I was out there. Bangkok, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur were all seen. I also got to spend some time with some university friends - Dom and Becca – in Brunei. They’ve got two kids now that it makes me feel really old.

After spending inordinate amounts of money over the three months I was away I didn’t do much more travelling – a trip to Italy to watch the Newcastle Falcons take on Petrarca Padova and a fleeting jaunt to Belgium for the F1 Grand Prix. Well, not as much as I’d like to. There’s something to be said for those people that spend a lot of time travelling!

Reviewing and Writing

Once I started writing and enjoying it I always planned to do a lot more than I actually have. If you followed this blog you’ll see that I did make a start on a fourth book not so long ago and I’ve briefly toyed with the idea of self-publishing a new book. Well, it’s one of the things that I need to do! There are maybe plans afoot to write more (and not necessarily in technical areas) and once the plans start to firm up then I can make some headway on those.

I’ve also not done as much reviewing as I’d like. If you look at the list of books that I’ve worked on (there’s a published works page on my main website – which reminds me I must update that pretty damn quick) there’s only three books in the last year (well four if you count the C# and VB versions of Professional Silverlight 3 separately). I’ve got a couple of Silverlight 4 technical reviews coming up for Apress which should be fun – I’m also trying to get some Windows Azure reviewing as it’s going to be a big growth area and definitely something that needs to be looked at.

Gigs

One of the highlights of the year for me is the number of gigs that I managed to get to. I always like to try and get to at least a gig a month and, apart from the three months away, I managed it. From seeing Metallica the day before I flew to Thailand, to Coldplay at Wembley, Bruce Springsteen and Blur in Hyde Park, Oasis at The Stadium of Light, and Papa Roach at the Newcastle Academy it was a very good year!

Work – aka The Things We Have to Do to Make the Other Things Possible

Work is one of those things that no-one wants to do but everyone has to. Last year was a particularly bad year for me work wise and not something that I’d want to repeat. If not for the three month sabbatical that I took I can’t say that I’d still be employed at the same place.

Returning from travelling was even harder. Coming back into the same job that you despised three months earlier – despite repeated promises made before I departed – tends to be a little soul destroying. Being a software developer it takes something to get you to a point where you don’t want to even look at a computer takes an awful lot.

That’s not to say that it was all bad. Well 90% of it was but there’s the 10% that was good. Things did get better towards the end of the year but it’s still the same old place – no matter how people try to change things they always stay the same.

So Where to Next?

So that was the year that was 2009. Onwards into 2010. New ideas, new people, new places.

There are lots of things that I’d like to do in 2010 – some of which are already happening, some of which need a lot more work before they become viable.

Travelling this year is pretty much out – with the Rugby World Cup being in New Zealand next year I need to spend as little as possible for the next year so that I can have three months off again. The current planning is to have two weeks in the Phillipines with Sunderland Scuba Centre, three weeks in Koh Tao, a week in Singapore for the F1 GP, then over to New Zealand for the England v Scotland game (what do you mean there are games before that – there’s only one that matters!). So it’s going to be expensive.

The user group I’m helping run, NEBytes, looks as though it’s going to be good. Over 80 people there for the launch event this month and we’re hoping that we can keep the numbers up around there – the higher the numbers we can get the bigger speakers we can get so here’s hoping.

It also may be time to start looking for another job. I was at BT for four years before I left and since then, other than two 18 month periods where I was self-employed, have worked in two year stints. I’m been in my current job for three years come April and it may be time for a change. Something challenging and worthwhile rather than a mundane 9-5!

DDD8 and thoughts about a DDD North East

I’ve attended the last two Developer Developer Developer events and yesterday was my third at DDD8.  I’ve blogged in the past about DDD6 but didn’t blog about DDD7 (something to do with watching the Newcastle Falcons play Worcester Warriors in Worcester the night before).

From a choice of 19 sessions (split over four tracks) it was quite difficult to pick the sessions that I wanted to attend.  There were some interesting sessions that I didn’t get to see but the ones I did were:

• “Real World MVC Architectures” by Ian Cooper was an interesting session.  It covered a lot of ground around some of the pitfalls that you may encounter when using MVC.
• “Commercial Software Development” by Liam Westley was the only non-technical session that I attended on the day.  A very good presentation with some  quite well done interludes to illustrate Liam’s points.  He’s up for NEBytes later in the year to deliver a developer session.
• “C'# 4” by the Google-man who nearly wasn’t an MVP, Jon Skeet, covered all the new stuff coming along.   Having tech reviewed Accelerated C#4.0 for Apress I’m quite happy with what is coming in C#4 but it was good to see a different take on them.  And I think I now get the difference between covariance and contravariance (go and read the Wikipedia article and see if it makes sense!).
• “Microsoft Surface” by Kris Athi was a nice introduction to Microsoft Surface and a look at some of the things that you can do on it.  Having got one sat in the corner of the office in my day job at TH_NK it gave me a few ideas as to what we could do with it.  It’ll be interesting to see how things move forward on this with the advances in multi-touch added in Windows 7 (the Surface platform is based upon Vista SP1 at the moment).  Definitely something to watch when Surface 2 arrives.
• “A Developers Guide to Encryption” by Barry Dorrans rounded out the day.  It was Barry’s last session at DDD as he’s drank the Kool-Aid and is off to Redmond on Friday and, as per usual, was an excellent one.  Whilst coping with the video interruptions poking fun at him, pimping his new book at every opportunity, and updating spelling mistakes on his slides on the fly, Barry covered all the basics of what you need to know.  Hashing, symmetric encryption, asymmetric encryption, and X509 certificates where all covered in Barry’s inimitable style.

Granted there were problems with ticketing and the way the tickets are allocated – I only got a ticket after being on the waitlist – it was a really good event again.  Hopefully these will be sorted in time for the next DDD event (which I did hear a rumour that it would be later in the year).  There was also rumblings of a third WebDD event later in the year as well.

DDD8 was the first event that I’ve attended since starting NEBytes and, whilst still attending and enjoying all of the sessions, it was with a slightly different outlook on things.

One of the things that the North East developer community missing is the bigger events.  There are several events ran (by NEBytes, SuperMondays, and SUGUK amongst others) and Black Marble run their events down in Leeds.  But there isn’t an all day event along the same lines as DDD.

And that’s what we’re thinking for later in the year for the North – a DDD North East if you will.  On a Saturday, several tracks (two developer, one IT Pro, one open source) with five sessions in each track, GrokTalks, and swag.  It won’t happen if people don’t want to see it – drop us a note at NEBytes if you think you’d like to see an event like this using the contact form.

Dan Pink and a Drink

I had the pleasure of attending the Codeworks Connect Think and a Drink event on Monday evening.  It’s the first one that I’ve attended and was a great event.  Being in The Sage was also an added bonus as I’ve never been inside what turned out to be a remarkable building.

The first speaker up was Caspar Berry.  Whilst not the talk I was most interested in seeing it was still worthwhile.  Some interesting points regarding risk taking and a few things to think about going forward.

I’ve talked about the second speaker, Dan Pink, before when attending the TEDx Newcastle event last year.  Whilst not startling different to the talk that he gave at TED Global (the video is online) it’s still a very good talk to see.  The insights that he brings to the table regarding motivation – autonomy, mastery and purpose – are fascinating and certainly something that all managers and employers should take into consideration.

The Future of NEBytes – aka Coming Soon

As part of the team behind NEBytes we’ve got quite a few events planned over the next sixth months for both Developers and IT Pros.  Whilst the launch event had three talks we realise that this is a bit much and the normal format is to have two events – one for Developers and one for IT Pros.

We’re currently planning three/four months out and at the moment we have speakers lined up until April – all will be revealed soon!

There may be times when when we partner with the SharePoint User Group to host a joint event and the format will probably change slightly when we have these.

We’re also looking at other formats and ideas (GrokTalk anyone?) for future events as well.  At the moment we’re concentrating upon technical subjects but that doesn’t mean to say that we won’t branch out into more “soft” subjects.

It’s all down to you, the attendees, to tell us what you want and we’ll see what we can do.  Drop us a note on the site using the contact form telling us what you want!

For February  we have two very good speakers lined up (or it may be three depending upon the format of one of the talks) – they’re speakers that we’ve had in the North East before under the old VBUG banner.  The details aren’t on the main site yet so I’m a bit reluctant to reveal the full details just in case things change.

When the event details go live there’ll be another post and we’re looking forward to seeing you there.  Well - Ben and I will be looking forward to it as Andrew and Jonathan are off to the MVP Summit in Seattle.

Introducing North East Bytes (NEBytes)

Rather than simply repeating what Andrew and Jon have said regarding the launch event for NEBytes I’ll just say – get booked it’ll be good.

Microsoft WebsiteSpark

I missed out on getting enrolled in the Microsoft BizSpark program due to to Littlepond being more than three years old.  It’s only really Visual Studio that I was after in the entire program (although having a full MSDN subscription wouldn’t be bad).

It was nice then to see Scott Guthrie launch the Microsoft WebsiteSpark program when on his European tour at the back end of last month.

Not only do you Visual Studio 2008 (and I’m assuming that it will be updated to include Visual Studio 2010 when that is released next year) but you also get:

• Production licenses for Windows Web Server 2008 R2
• Production licenses for SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
• 3 Visual Studio 2008 Professional licenses
• 1 Expression Studio 3 license
• 2 Expression Web 3 licenses

It’s a tidy little program.  It’ll cost you $100 in three years when you leave the program but that’s small change when you look at what buying the software provided individually would cost.

TEDx Newcastle

I attended the TEDx Newcastle event last night at the Tyneside Cinema.  A community organised offshoot of the global TED events.  A really well organised event that had three local talks and two “roll-vt” talks from the main TED events.

The three local talks were given by Mike Stenhouse, Chris Stainthorpe, and Andy Budd.  Two first and last covering user experience with the middle talk covering privacy.  They were all filmed so look for the videos online – there was talk that they’d be available somewhere!

The two “TED talks”, for me, were the highlight of the evening.  I’ve watched a couple of the TED talks online and the two that were shown on the night were definitely up there with the best that I’ve watched.

• Ed Ulbrich gave an overview of the visual effects work on Benjamin Button.  Well worth a watch but it did raise the interesting question that if an actor plays a character but it’s not really him for the first hour of a film (watch the talk) then how far off having completely digital actors are we.
• The second TED talk was by far the highlight of the evening with Dan Pink talking about how motivation and carrot-and-stick approach to incentives doesn’t work and possible new ways of managing and rewarding people for working.  Certainly something to think about for any managers out there!

And in closing they played a video from the Playing For Change project.  Recorded at various places around the world in the local style and then mixed into one track.  It felt a little random tacked on the end as it was but it’s well worth having a look at Stand By Me on YouTube.  Absolutely fantastic and you can buy the CD and DVD that came out of it.