Like other Microsoft MVPs I have been given a few MSDN Ultimate licenses that I can give away to individuals that I feel are deserving of it. I have been arguing with myself for a while now about how to best determine who should receive the license, and have came up with a contest to give one license away to a reader of this blog.
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Posted by Mitchel on Tuesday, July 13, 2010
As I have mentioned before I am working on a book that covers Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. So I have been playing with Visual Studio 2010 for quite a while now, and many of the common lines of feedback have been that the product is a great improvement in a lot of areas, however, there has been an overarching performance issue that has been plaguing various aspects of the new release. Late yesterday Scott Guthrie from Microsoft blogged a Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Update announcing that Microsoft is pushing the release date of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 back "a few weeks" to allow for a public release candidate in the February 2010 time frame.
Although I'm anxious to be able to use the new version of Visual Studio as some of the already existing performance improvements have been great. Especially the "Reference Dialog Load Time" improvement, which is just amazing. I'm glad to see that the feedback that all of the beta testers, MVP's and other people that have been testing and working with Visual Studio has been taken very seriously. I think with the additional time, they are going to be able to deliver a product that is that much superior!
Posted by Mitchel on Friday, December 18, 2009
I am again traveling this week, in Toronto speaking at Tech Days Canada 2009, and as luck would have it I needed to complete some work on a few custom DotNetNuke modules for clients on a "Urgent" basis. So this afternoon I darted off to the speaker room to get an internet connection, just recently I re-formatted my laptop to move to Windows 7, one of the main reasons that I needed to re-format the system was to create an environment that matched my primary development machine, today was the first true test of this new configuration. Thankfully everything worked as expected and all issues were resolved. In this blog post, I'll explain a bit as to why it is important when working on multiple environments to have consistent system configurations.
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Posted by Mitchel on Tuesday, September 29, 2009
For those of you that follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed my posting earlier today, well technically Thursday asking about a Windows 7 upgrade. Well contrary to the consensus I decided to give it a shot an upgrade my primary development machine to Windows 7 Enterprise from the existing Windows Vista Enterprise x64 installation. Before I started I finished all work that is needed until early next week, re-validated all of my new backups that were taken with Acronis and decided that I was set to go.
I was amazed at first glance when the Windows installer noted that I have a few programs that might have issues, and it recommended a few changes to ensure that I don't have any problems. I quickly followed their recommendations and was on my way to start the upgrade. It started out very quick, and looked like it was going to be a very fast process. About 18% in on the unpacking files step and the installation paused, waiting for over 30 minutes, eventually restarting and continuing.
This had me concerned a bit, but there is a LOT of software installed on this machine and a lot of things for the upgrade to contend with. The rest of the upgrade was going smoothly, two other small pauses at other points. In the end, about 2.5 hours later I am fully booted into Windows 7 and EVERYTHING is working!
I'm incredibly impressed thus far, now I'm fully aware that something might crop up later due to taking this route, but at this point I have to say it was the smoothest upgrade ever, AND I have a fully working dev machine!
Great job Windows team!!!
Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, August 06, 2009
As some readers of this blog might have known about 2 weeks ago, I suffered from a critical hardware component failure on my primary development machine. Initially unsure of the exact issue I was seeing the hard drive as a potential failure point. It was at that point that I realized exactly how horrible it would be if the drive failed. Don't get me wrong, I have backups both locally, in my source control system remotely, as well as in the cloud using Jungle Disk. But the total time to recovery would be massive. I have a list of around 100 or so applications that would need to be installed to get me back to "full" working state. Not an easy task! Luckily for me, it was some bad RAM and the system was restored after my new RAM came in.
However, this was a very enlightening experience for me and prompted me to re-visit the concept of disk imaging. This is what prompted the review of Acronis Backup and Recovery, as it is my selected and implemented solution for the long term.
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Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, July 30, 2009
A very common question that I get asked by people is; what tools do you use to complete your development and what type of system do you use. Now, I believe I have written a bit about this in the past, but I thought I would take some time to go through and give a bit of a detailed overview of what I use for development and why I have selected the hardware and software that I have. I will cover this in detail from both the hardware and software point of view.
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Posted by Mitchel on Friday, May 22, 2009
My last blog article "Selecting the Right Source Control Provider" touched on the evaluation criteria that I use when looking for a source control system. This article is a review of sorts of SourceGear's Vault product, my preferred source control system. I'll start by reviewing vault as it relates to the criteria from the previous article, I will then provide my overall feedback on my experience with Vault.
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Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, April 16, 2009
One of the most common questions that I have been getting recently has been "what source control provider do you use and why?". This article is the first in a series of two articles about source control. This article takes a quick look at criteria that I believe is important to consider when it comes to evaulating source control systems for use. The next article in the series will be a review of the source control system that I use, in relation to the evaulation criteria that I list in this article.
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Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Recently I have been responding to more and more forum posts and e-mails regarding DotNetNuke and selecting a hosting provider. Back in May I had a blog post Selecting a Hosting Provider Revisited, this article did a great job of outlining the basic consideration points when it comes to selecting a hosting environment for DotNetNuke. However, recent technology changes and other hosting options has created a few more items that need to be considered. This article is designed to specifically address the concerns and questions behind shared, virtual dedicated, dedicated, and cloud hosting options.
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Posted by Mitchel on Monday, December 08, 2008
One item that many people find unusual about my DotNetNuke installation guides is my insistance on NOT using the Database.mdf, dynamically attached database file for the creation of a DotNetNuke database. In my tutorials I have quickly dismissed the topic by noting that "issues" come up when trying to use a dynamically attached database and I leave it at this. Well after seeing more questions on this topic recently in the DotNetNuke.com forums I wanted to take a moment to put my $0.02 out there as to WHY I don't like it. I will do this by discussing quickly what the differences are in the two approaches, then I'll discuss the "downfalls" of each.
Differences in Approach
Everyone is most likely familiar with the common process for creating a SQL Server databse, during the creation process two files are added the .mdf which stores the actual data and the .ldf which stoes the log. When the database is created the files are typically placed inside the "Program Files" folder, storing them with the rest of the SQL Server files, although this location can be changed by the Server Administrator.
The dynamic attachment method uses a pre-defined database.mdf file that is located in the App_Data folder of the DotNetNuke installation. When the system connects to the database server this file is attached to the server and operates like a database on the server would normally, however, all data is stored inside the DNN location.
Why I Think Its Bad
One of the most common arguments supporting Dynamically attached databases is that they "save time". Well That might be true for the first connection, however, in my experience the time spent troubleshooting later makes it a much longer process. The first thing to remember is that the database is attached and it has a name associated with it, DotNetNuke when working with DNN, if you go to install a second DotNetNuke installation on the same server with the dynamically attached file an error will appear noting that the database already exists. For beginners this can be a very upsetting experience.
However, the most problematic downfall of dynamically attached databases in my experience is that you must "Attach" the database before you can manipulate it in SQL Server Management Studio or SSMS Express. This is a very common stumbling block as individuals will know that the database exists, however, SSMS will not show the database at all, until it has ben successfully attached.
Overall
I feel that overall there are no compelling reasons that would direct a person to use a dynamically attached database rather than a standard SQL Server database especially when it comes to databases that need to be administered on a regular basis. If working in a test environment it might be helpful to have a dynamically attached database, but that is a limited use case, and for the most part DotNetNuke databases at one point in their life will need to be administered, backed up, restored, or moved. For these actions a standard database is a good way to go.
Please share any comments/feedback below.
Posted by Mitchel on Monday, November 24, 2008
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