You're not going to die wondering with this Notes action button. This is the entire block of code in this action, so the comment increases the volume by 100%!
REM {ACTION CLOSES WINDOW};@Command([FileCloseWindow]);
Clearing the cache of a LINQ to SQL DataContext sounds like a useful thing to be able to do now and again. Seems a bit of a shame that you need to use reflection to do it, but handy to know nonetheless.
Over the past couple of weeks I've done 2 Domain upgrades to From Domino R7 to R8. Both experiences have been a great reminder about what a great server product Domino is, and go a long way to explain why Domino Administrators love the product - much to the bewilderment of their users who just don't get the attraction. The upgrades just worked – no hassle, no problems, just
Then there's the R8 client. I'm just not that impressed. I did a bit of testing with the R8 client betas, testing both the basic and Godzilla standard versions, and while it was definately updated and improved I just wasn't as "wowed" as I felt I should be. Maybe it's just been too long away from the Kool Aid, or too much time spent using Outlook 2007, it just needed to try harder in my humble opinion.
So after a few Notes-free months I'm back looking at 8.02 on behalf of various clients. It's a lot faster for sure, and the memory consumption seems to be nicely curbed, but I'm noticing a few weird client lockups on Vista machines. It's happening on more than one workstation, and these are all brand new machines, so it feels like a Notes/Vista compatiability issue where 50% of the time when you run Notes it just locks up during startup, whereas the rest of the time it's fine. Vista is all up to date (well, as up to date as Vista can be), and I've experienced this with a fresh build which had no JVM installed as well as after installing the latest version of Sun's JVM. Things seem to be more reliable when adding the –sa switch to run 8.02 in basic mode, but I've not tested that too thoroughly.
So this is a long way of saying that Domino server is very cool, but at the same time asking if there are any known issues with the 8.x client and Windows Vista? Drop me a comment if you know of anything worth taking a look at, thanks!
Last week the ADO.NET team posted an Update on LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities Roadmap, and since then there have been a lot of reaction postings popping up all over the place – followed of course by reaction postings to the reactions.
The original post is pretty typical management speak (except for the fact that it doesn't use the word 'Synergy' anywhere), but if it doesn't seem overly sinister to you then you apparently need to read between the lines. Hmm. This sort of sibling rivalry between LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework was always going to pick up at some point, and I wonder whether the community reactions really say more about people's like for LINQ to SQL or their dislike for the Entity Framework.
Personally, I like LINQ to SQL and hope it stays around in some form for some time to come. I've used it on many small and simple applications, and it's served me well. Sure, there was a bit of work and research required to find a way to make it fit nicely into a tiered application structure, and it's never going to be comparable to a full blown product such as LLBLGenPro, but for the right situation (small, quick, SQL Server based agile applications) it served it's purpose, has been easy to work with, and the price was right.
It can be pretty demoralising putting a personal investment into technology only to have it made obsolete. Ater spending a bit of time refining my L2S implementations I'd definitely feel slightly down to have the technology yanked completely, because part of my justification for investigating it's use over continuing with LLBLGenPro was that I figured LINQ to SQL would be around for a fair amount of time, so it'd be a good investment to have a data access recommendation that I could make to any customers who weren't interested money in LLBL licenses and time in upskilling in a third party product.
Obviously this is all speculation right now, and only time will tell what's actually going to happen, but given the fact that Entity Framework has been billed as the data access solution of choice for some time now, none of this should really be much of a surprise to anyone.
I'd be interested to see what LINQ to SQL might evolve into if it was eventually thrown out handed over to an open source team and hosted on CodePlex (yes, I'm aware of DbLinq but haven't had time to check it out – comments welcome if you have). I'm not sure whether Microsoft would ever set itself up to have it's flagship solution compete against it's discarded technology, but it'd certainly be interesting times if they did.
..and if they don't, I'll be quite happy to turn my attentions back to LLBLGenPro.
(I resisted partaking in bad LINK vs LINQ puns – thank me later)
Link: Clarifying the message on L2S Futures
Link: LINQ to SQL next steps
This post was originally going to be about using a mobile phone (in my case, a TyTn II) as a modem over Bluetooth in OSX. To my somewhat untrained eye, it doesn't exactly seem in line with the rest of the Mac experience, but I could be missing something obvious.
With my previous (Windows) laptop, I installed ActiveSync + Bluetooth drivers (which were missing initially - I'd disabled Bluetooth in the BIOS as I'd never needed it before) on the laptop and things seemed to work ok. There were a fair few steps required to get up and running with this solution:
First I'd run the Windows Mobile Internet connection sharing app, then Ignore warning "If this is the first time you've used this then the device must be made visible, do you want to do this now?" message which I didn't seem to be able to turn off. Next switch to the laptop, and activate the HP's "wireless" hardware function - turn off WiFi if it was enabled, to save power. Still on the laptop, right click the Bluetooth systray icon, select my Device name, choose Network Access, then click connect. Wait a little bit… Done!
It wasn't exactly elegant but it worked well enough for me to use it pretty solidly on the train for about 6 months.
Track forward to trying to get the TyTn II connected to my Mac, and I'm wrangling with an OS that I don't know too well as well as realising that ActiveSync was probably doing a lot more work than I ever gave it credit for on my Windows box. All my googling seemed to point me to posts which seemed a little too convoluted for my liking – oh, and they didn't seem to work for me either. I'm definately pretty new to OSX, but this stuff is supposed to "just work" (tm), right?
This is where the post is no longer about getting my TyTn II to work as a modem over Bluetooth in OSX, because it didn't take long for me to remember WM WiFiRouter. I mentioned this briefly a while back, however back then the Bluetooth + Windows combo was working pretty well so I didn't ever get around to testing it despite the fact that it sounded pretty neat.
Shame on me. This morning I installed the product, configured it, and got the Mac connected in about 10 minutes while I was eating breakfast. It's quick, simple, has some neat features and it *feels* faster when it's in use. All I need to do now is run the app and click a nice large icon, and my Mac will automatically find my TyTn as a known preferred network and connect.
The only downside to this is that the wireless connection can only be encrypted using WEP. It's not exactly ideal, but it's probably going to be good enough for the locations and situations I'll be using it for – besides, it's not as if WPA is really all that much better, and securing the use of your phone's Internet connection using something such as a Radius server is slightly overkill – even for me. a few more options for monitoring and security would be nice, but maybe that's a task best left for tomorrow's breakfast. Power consumption stats for Bluetooth vs WiFi is also something I need to do a bit more research into as well.
So far I'm pretty impressed with WM WifiRouter and after 12 hours of my trial period I know I'll be buying it shortly.
On another note, it's always a weird feeling when the solution to a problem is right under your nose – but it's an even weirder feeling when you actually wrote about the solution to your own problem months before you experienced it. Hmm.
At the risk of adding too much to the echo chamber, Scott Guthrie's October 22nd post has some pretty useful resources for anyone looking to get better acquainted with the use of jQuery with ASP.NET (as well as other useful things of course, but I found the jQuery info particularly useful).
I was so busy last week that I managed to miss that the final version of Silverlight 2 was released.
It's probably a suitable time to think out loud a little bit about Silverlight and it's future. I've been tinkering with Silverlight on and off since the initial 1.0 release and have a few projects I've been working on using various versions of the v2 betas. As a web developer I'm finding it great to work with, but for a long time I've had concerns about it's adoption by both developers and users (most importantly, corporate users who tend to have optional workstation components dictated to them).
About a year ago, using Silverlight 1.0 for a project which needed to use a lot of rich video proved to be a good excuse to learn a bit about it, and during that time I learned something important – don't bother with the 1.0 release, it was all about 2.0 (which of course was initially announced as Silverlight 1.1, then later renamed to 2.0).
So here we are, a year or so on, with a 2.0 release of a product which is actually more like it's initial offering. There's been some pretty exciting sample applications popping up ever since the first betas of 2 were released, and it was always easy to see the potential of the product, but from here on in we'll see whether this thing takes off or not. If you were evaluating whether to use Silverlight 2 for a live application a week or so ago then the whole "it's still in beta" aspect was likely to turn you away pretty quickly. Now there are no excuses.
The intarwebs are a funny place, and add-on/proprietary formats have always come under fire. Adobe Flash was initially released in 1996 – that's 12 years of cursing about plug-in installers, version mismatches, bloated page sizes, and broken site navigation - and even though most of us accept that flash is here to stay, we're still complaining and poking at Flash whenever we can (well, I am anyway). Add to this the fact that many denizens of the Internet have a slightly cynical approach to Microsoft and it's products, and it's clear that Silverlight is going to need to fight pretty hard to get the wide acceptance that it needs to become a viable choice for developing rich Internet applications.
Here's hoping it wins the fight – developing and using Silverlight so far has been exciting, and we're only getting started.
I've been using Evernote for a while now. I found myself using it a lot while I was travelling by train, as I'd sync between home, work and my laptop over my "3g" (actual 3g service may drop down to GPRS speeds without warning, thanks Vodafone NZ!), but I was never quite happy with the client software.
The mac client looks nice (which reminds me I need to write about my mac), the Windows client is adequate (much improved recently, but still not amazing), and the Windows Mobile client is pretty mediocre. It's still a great service, but as a developer I'm allowed to be picky right?
Anyway I was glad to read today about the release of the Evernote API. With Mac and Windows scripting options for simple command line applications as well as a full API, it should spawn a few yet unthought of uses for Evernote and maybe a few interesting options for alternative clients.
Link: Evernote for Developers
After writing about the latest Live Writer beta having patchy 64bit support again, I came across this collection of direct download links. I've had the url sitting on my secondary PC for a week or so now waiting to get a chance to test it works, which I can happily confirm it does.
Link: Direct Links for Windows Live Wave 3
About me
My name is Ross Hawkins and I'm a Developer, Consultant and Writer based in Auckland,
New Zealand. My current work revolves around ASP.NET, C#, Ajax,
SQL Server, and a mix of other Microsoft development technologies. Previously
I spent about 11 years working with Lotus Notes/Domino.
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