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A lesson I learned the hard way today, while installing aspell support for Notepad++:

If you’re installing Kevin Atkison’s English dictionary for aspell, you need to disable your antivirus program (at least, if you’re using Avast, as I am).

If you don’t, the dictionary installer can’t write its unpacked files to disk and will fail silently. As in, it just plain closes, and Notepad++ will report something along the lines of “Aspell and/or dictionaries are missing.”

FYI.

Also, if you haven’t heard of Notepad++, you should check it out. It’s an open-source, GPL-licensed Win32 text editor. (It runs perfectly fine in Win64).

Highly extensible via plugins, translated to all kinds of languages, exceptionally powerful, with support for syntax highlighting in just about every programming language under the Sun and syntax checking for a fair number of them, too.

It’s pretty much the only tool I use any more for Web coding, even when writing ASP.NET Web Forms. (I still use Visual Studio for some Windows coding. But Notepad++ has completely replaced Dreamweaver.)

All links in this post on delicious: http://delicious.com/dougvdotcom/disable-windows-antivirus-when-installing-aspell-english-dictionary

A common need in the ASP.NET world is how to back up a remote SQL Server database, usually provided by someone else. Sometimes, you want to occasionally run a backup as an extra layer of redundancy; other times, you are changing hosts or want to be ready to do so.

How you back up a remote SQL Server database depends largely, if not entirely, on the tools your Web host is willing to give you.

Most Web service providers will give you some implementation of a BACKUP Transact-SQL query; the resulting .bak file is then either put into a directory on your Web server, or you’re given a download link. And generally speaking, that .bak file is enough to create a fresh version of your database, either at the same host or someplace else.

But not always. You generally can’t be sure of the integrity of a .bak file run by a Web service provider; you also may find that, due to the way that WSP’s servers are configured, the backup file it creates won’t work elsewhere, or are problematic to use. I’ve had bad luck using .bak files to replicate databases between Web service providers.

Another option is to simply download the remote database’s MDF file. I like this approach best because as a rule, if you have the relevant MDF file and the same version of SQL Server, you can simply attach the MDF file to a new SQL Server instance, and it’s like the database was there all along.

There are two more options available — again, depending on how your Web service provider allows you to connect to the remote database — and I’ll blog on both.

Today, I’ll discuss using SQL Server Management Studio Express, and its built-in scripting tools, to dump your remote database to SQL command files. Next time, I’ll write an ASP.NET script that will back up our database to SQL files.

Continue reading: Backing Up Your SQL Server Database To SQL Files With Management Studio Express »

After the nearly complete disappointment of Launch 2010 Boston, I had given serious thought to not going to the MSDN Northeast Roadshow stop in Augusta, ME on Tuesday, May 11. I figured it would be little more than a regurgitation of what happened at last month’s event.

I’m glad I decided to go. What a huge difference.

In  half the time, Jim O’Neil and Chris Bowen provided immeasurably more valuable and interesting information about Visual Studio 2010 and changes to Silverlight, multithreading, ASP.NET and an overview of Windows Phone 7. Here’s a recap.

Jim O'Neil describes Silverlight 4's new video / webcam support features.

Silverlight 4: Lately, listening to Microsoft describe a new Web technology brings to mind the phrase “a day late and a dollar short.” That’s certainly the case with Silverlight 4.

Admittedly, Microsoft has shifted the emphasis behind Silverlight to be less a clone of Flash and more an extension to the Web of Windows Presentation Foundation. But the “new features” O’Neil described on Tuesday were very much old technologies for Flash, and pretty much obsolete tech given HTML5.

Specifically, Silverlight 4 supports Web cams and microphones; TCP/UDP; printing; and a multiple-trust-level model that includes access to the file system, cross-domain requests and COM integration. Additionally, the XAML one writes to render Silverlight, while still different from WPF XAML, is a lot more like WPF.

Silverlight is, therefore, weaker than Flash and stronger than it at the same time. But it seems mostly moot, given that Flash itself is falling out of favor in response to the HTML5 specification’s API support for audio, video and other complex objects. Admittedly, there are things one can do in Silverlight — namely, presenting stored data and integrating existing COM components, such as text-to-speech or an interface to a proprietary business object / program — that one cannot do directly in HTML5.

That seems to me more likely to matter when making a corporate intranet or the like. I didn’t see much hope for Silverlight when it was introduced in 2007, and I still don’t see a future for it.

Continue reading: MSDN Northeast Roadshow, Augusta, ME, May 11, 2010 Recap »

And now, for some levity, courtesy of Andrew Clover at doxdesk.com: An obvious trolling of Stack Overflow (and one which they have removed), but a funny one, nonetheless.

(Click for full-size pic)

So full of win, from start to finish. Even the “Related” links are hilarious. FYI, bobince — the straight man in this joke — is Clover.

All links in this post: http://delicious.com/dougvdotcom/how-to-not-add-numbers-in-javascript-and-how-to-troll

Now that I’m a day or so removed from the Visual Studio “Launch 2010″ event in Boston, have plenty of sleep under my belt, and the benefit of hindsight, I’d like to recap my impressions.

I still consider Launch 2010 a significant disappointment, especially compared to the “Heroes Happen Here” launch of Visual Studio 2008 / SQL Server 2008 / Windows Server 2008 that was held in Manchester, NH, two years ago. But I should explain why, and maybe at least put in context, if not rephrase, my criticisms of Thursday.

Attendance: I need to clarify my attendance estimates from Thursday.

I’m guessing there were about 1,000 people in attendance at Launch 2010, which had three tracks: two all-day tracks for developers and IT professionals, and a half-day track for managers / decision makers. Of the total number of attendees, well over half  — at least 500 — were in the developer track. I don’t have an exact count because I don’t know who to ask for one, and I doubt there is an accurate count in any event, because Microsoft was allowing walk-ins throughout the event.

However many people were there, it was too many, at least for the developer track. They ran out of seats by 9:30 AM and it only got worse until 3:30 PM, after the ASP.NET session, after which a large number of people left. I did pop in on the IT pro track, after I couldn’t regain my seat following lunch; there were a few empty seats available there.

Allowing such a significant overflow is a huge kick in the balls. I took the time to register ahead of time. I took great pains to ensure I would arrive on time. If you’re letting people filter in six hours after they were supposed to show up, you’re not being fair to me — especially if I can’t fully enjoy the event.

Continue reading: The Visual Studio Launch 2010 Boston Event, Reconsidered »