Yes, it's that time again.  Time to start thinking about all the cool stuff you've been working on and how you can share your wisdom and knowledge with the rest of us.  MySQL Users Conference 2005 was a HUGE success and we expect this year to be even bigger! 

If you have a .NET or Mono project that uses MySQL or Connector/Net then we want to hear from you.  You can go here to submit your session proposal.  You have to hurry!  The deadline for proposals is November 7 with all speakers being notified by November 30. 

.NET and Mono use of Connector/Net is growing everyday and we want to have a good showing at the Users Conference and show our support for Connector/Net and the .NET/Mono platform in general.  See you there!

Microsoft has taken pity on those of us who couldn't make it to the PDC this year and posted all the sessions online complete with speaker video and slides.  I watched the Monad presentation yesterday and was blown away.  It will take me some time to work my way through all these videos so I am basically posting this here as a reminder to myself.

Here is the link.

Being a software developer, I'm naturally bound to start delivering 64 bit binaries of the products I work on.  So, like any good geek, I partition off and install an x64 flavor of Windows and install my preferred set of tools.  I've been very impressed with the Windows Server 2003 SP1 x64 edition but I just can't seem to use it for my day to day work.  Why?  There are just too many tools, add-ins, plug-ins, and other type of -ins that I use on a day to day basis that do not yet work on x64.  TortoiseSVN is one.  MSN Search toolbar is another.  *None* of my printers work.  Bah!

So, I've been hoping that either VMWare or Virtual PC would support 64 bit guest operating systems while running on a 32 bit host OS.  This would allow me to stay in Windows 2003 x32 and still build/test software using x64.  No luck, until yesterday.  Santa stopped by and dropped me an email that VMWare had …

I know the .NET framework is still in it's infancy but there are some parts of it that just make you want to say "what were you guys thinking?".  With this blog entry I start a new series called .NETBF.  If you need help determining what the BF stands for, drop me a line.  I might tell you.  :-)

Today's gem is the socket class.  Let's say you want to write code that will connect to a remote server, timing out after a customizable number of seconds.  Being very well versed in the BeginConnect/EndConnect pair and how they can be used to connect asynchronously to a remote server, this is what you might use.  In fact, this was exactly how our Connector/Net provider implemented ConnectTimeout until I got a bug report from a guy who was trying to connect to 300 servers *simultaneously*.  It seems that after about 25 connections, they all started failing.  Why?

First, you have to understand …

Ok.  Finally took the fifteen minutes required to upgrade to dasBlog 1.8.  No problems.  It sure is a joy to use a well-written piece of software.

Here's a nice Visual Studio tip that allows you to easily add vertical visual guides in the text editor.  This is handy if your like me and work in an environment where some developers are using Emacs or VI and really dislike code lines longer than 80 chars. 

http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2005/08/18/422920.aspx

http://www.theserverside.net/news/thread.tss?thread_id=35745

Don't get me wrong, I love Monad.  I think it will bring a very powerful shell and scripting setup to Windows which has badly needed one for so long.  However, based on the performance I've seen out of Monad on Windows Server 2003 x64, I suspect  Microsoft decided that requiring an extra gigahertz of CPU power to run their *shell* was just out of line. 

Btw, why hasn't someone in the development community written a monad type system before now? 

Testing is a big part of software development and I've really subscribed to the TDD methodology.  Lately, I've really been wondering how I was going to run  my test suite on Pocket PC devices or on the device emulator.  Well, I may have found the answer here.

I'll post a and let you know how it goes.  It appears promising but the project may need a little seasoning before it's truly useful.

Yes, you can do this from any scripting language but it's cool that these types of things are possible from the future Windows command line.

http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/CommentView,guid,ec9e718a-5a20-479b-87be-51f84a2ca080.aspx

http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/07/switch_file_and_1.html

So Microsoft decided to make the compiler and linker portions of Visual Studio 2003 available free of charge in the form of the Visual C++ Toolkit 2003.  This seems like a very generous move since they seem to be having no problem selling their entire Visual Studio lineup.  In fact, it is a very generous move but if you look a little deeper you see that nothing is truly free.

The problems are all from missing files.  I guess the person who packaged it up for distribution at Microsoft just forgot to include them, right?  Right....    Nmake is the first omission you'll find.  You can either download the platform SDK (I hope your bandwidth is not metered) or use some other tool such as nant.  Either way, there are free ways of working around this limitation.

The second omission you'll find is lib.exe.  Yes, lib.exe is just a wrapper around link -lib but what could possibly be gained …