Some time ago I wrote a post introducing two members of my team, Fernando and Gabriella.  I was focused at the time on introducing relatively new members to the team and, in my error, I failed to introduce one member who has been with me for quite some time.  We have also since added 3 more individuals to our growing team.  This team is called the Windows Experience Group and we are doing some really exciting work.  You've already met Fernando and Gabriella. Here is the rest of the team.

Note: I’ve decided not to use Veewee due to silly compatibility issues for now.

Quoting from Vagrant’s web site:

Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments. By providing automated creation and provisioning of virtual machines using Oracle’s VirtualBox, Vagrant provides the tools to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual environments.

A complementary technology called Veewee makes building VirtualBox VMs easier by automating away a lot of manual steps. Marius Ducea has a great blog post on how to use it.

My observations:
1. According to Vagrant’s web site, it should work on Windows. I’ve …

MySQL Connector/Net 6.5.2, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This is the first of our two Release Candidate (RC) releases.  As is the case with all non-GA releases, it should not be used in any production environment.  It is appropriate for use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.6

It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/#downloads and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point-if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

The 6.5 release of MySQL Connector/Net brings new features such as

• Exception and command injector support
• Millseconds support
• Better partial-trust support …

MySQL Connector/Net 6.5.1, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This is a beta release of our newest connector and comes with several new features.  It is of beta quality and should not be used in any production environment.  It is appropriate for use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.6

It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/#downloads and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point-if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

This new versions brings new features such as

• Exception and command injector support
• Millseconds support
• Better partial-trust support
…

MySQL Connector/Net 6.5.1, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This is a beta release of our newest connector and comes with several new features.  It is of beta quality and should not be used in any production environment.  It is appropriate for use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.6

It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/#downloads and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point-if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

This new versions brings new features such as

• Exception and command injector support
• Millseconds support
• Better partial-trust support
…

The best way to run pt-query-digest is by making absolutely sure it is not running on any server that is even slightly important to production.

I recently had a case where pt-query-digest took up all the memory and swap on a (linux) development server. I think the reason was that the slow log had blob data in it.
Even though it wasn't a production server, it managed to upset some people.


So I:

1. Installed strawberry perl on my windows computer
2. Downloaded the gzip'd slow log file (using WinSCP)
3. Unzip'd it
4. Saved percon.com/get/pt-query-digest to a .pl file on my laptop
5. Went …

Previously, I’ve called out years for non-desktop Linux in 2008, Linux in both the low and high-ends of the market in 2009, ‘hidden’ Linux in 2010 and last year, cloud computing in 2011. For 2012, I see continued growth, prevalence, innovation and impact from Linux, thus leading to a 2012 that is dominated by Linux.

I expect to see nothing but continued strength for Linux and …

As you probably know, there were some problems using our connector in medium-trust level scenarios. Most hosting services provide MySQL access.  Most of these hosting providers run their .NET web apps using medium trust.  Prior to 6.5, our connector required the hosting provider to either run the application in full trust or to enable broad privileges like SocketPermission globally.  Many hosting providers are unwilling to do that.  So fully enabling our provider to run in a partial trust scenario was a strongly requested feature. The request was a very simple task: enable Connector/Net to work correctly in a medium-trust level environment when the library is installed in the GAC.

The implementation consisted of including the necessary security imperative asserts so the CLR allows our code to perform the operations where it needs permission to perform.

The permissions that we needed were: …

Connector/Net is now enabled to work inside a Medium/Partial Trust security level. Just download the new 6.5 version to use with your .Net application and you should be able to see it working just fine.

We have a new feature as part of the 6.5 release. There is a new class that you can use to restrict access to specific connection strings that you want to use in all the connections in applications that use MySQL databases.

The following example shows how you can use the MySQLClientPermission class to restrict access to a specific server name and a database, while allowing any value for the User Id and Password within the connection string:

MySqlClientPermission permission = new MySqlClientPermission(PermissionState.None);

permission.Add("server=localhost;database=test;", " user id=; password=;",

KeyRestrictionBehavior.AllowOnly);

permission.PermitOnly();

MySqlConnection myconn = new MySqlConnection();

myconn.ConnectionString = "server=localhost; user id=QueryUser; database=test;";

myconn.Open();  // Attempt to use the connection string

The first line of …