March 2007 Blog Posts
We had an interesting discussion here about Katmai (the next SQL Server version)
Of course it was discussed in the latest MVP summit, but noone can say anything because it's all under NDA.
So i'm wondering why.... WHY is it under NDA? Is there some very special reason for that?
Nigel responded to my question with this:
I think it's more to do with managing expectations.
A lot of things talked about are under development and may be dropped from the product if they look like they might impact the release date.
They want an opinion on the usability of proposed functionality from a closed community before a...
I have written before about running Windows Forms GUI tests on a compiled application exe here.
And i must say that it works GREAT!
I had a few problems of which the most annoying was the Drag and Drop functionality. If you have it enabled with AllowDrop = true
on your controls or any other 3rd party controls the moment your control gets loaded you will get this error:
System.InvalidOperationException: DragDrop registration did not succeed. --->
System.Threading.ThreadStateException: Current thread must be set to single thread apartment (STA) mode
...
I just hate having nulls in my DateTime columns. Having them always mean you also have to handle them in some way in your app.
The most common way is something like this:
public DateTime SomeDate
{
get
{
if (dr["SomeDate"] == DBNull.Value)
return DateTime.MinValue;
else
return (DateTime)dr["SomeDate"];
}
set
{
...
MsSqlSystemResource is a database that complements the master db. It is like the name smartly imples a resource database. All system stored procedures, views and functions are stored here. This databse is by all means hidden from the user. You can't view it in Object Explorer nor with the use of sp_helpDb or selecting from a sys.databases view. So how do we know it's even there? Pretty simple. Go to the Data directory of your SQL installation where the databases are put by default and there you'll see MsSqlSystemResource.mdf and MsSqlSystemResource.ldf. The reason for this db is in my opinion...
A while ago i explained why do you need a [Flags] attribute on the Enum here. We'll since then i was happy with my flags until i got to the point of having 16 flags. So why is that a problem? Well it's not really but 2^16 is how much? If you had to open the all mighty calculator you see my point. I stop counting powers of 2 after 4096 = 2^12. I see no reason to remember those. That's why I wanted to write my enums a bit simpler. Like saying this is 2 to the power of 1, 2,...
While searching for something in BOL i've accidently stumbled onto this little cool command line utility
TableDiff.exe is a table comparison tool that comes with the sql server.
It's installed on the server in the:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\COM\TableDiff.exe"
if your SQL Server is installed in the program files on c: drive.
Example use:
This compares 2 tables in the same database on the same server and creates a new table called DiffsTable that holds the differences:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\COM\tablediff.exe" -sourceserver MyServer1
...
NUnitForms is a pretty awsome tool for GUI unit testing.
However it lacks one major thing. You can't test a whole exe or dll.
For example if you have a MyTestApp.exe with various win forms etc., you can't just run it and test it's gui.
And i really wanted to do it because our app sets a lot of other stuff and it's pretty complex so you can't just
call Form.Show() and start playing with it.
So with a lot experimenting and reading and going through NUnitForms source code I've come up with a way to do it.
The first thing to know is how NUnitForms...