Here's a link to an article about keys in SQL. Make sure you read the comments. I wonder where most people fall on this subject and the split (if any) between developers and DBA’s (and people have to fill both roles)?

Personally, I don’t give a crap about whether identity keys are “exposed physical locators”. How about GUIDs or Stored Procedures which generate an incrementing number instead? I’ll be honest, I’ve never used them to identify the physical location. It’s just that I’ve found that “natural keys aren’t” (I think I first heard that from Jim Booth http://www.jamesbooth.com ) and having a system generated key greatly simplifies any code I’ve needed to write against a SQL backend (VFP or SQL Server). I’ve worked with systems that exclusively used natural keys and invariably what seemed like a reasonable natural key suddenly wasn’t any more. This usually meant we now had to use multiple columns to uniquely identify the record (this usually ends up happening more than once on the same table). No thanks. I’m sure some people would argue that changes like this just means we didn’t do a proper design. Yeah, that could be the case. But I’d much rather use a style of development that was more flexible to change and more forgiving of developer errors than one that leads to nightmarish spaghetti code just because someone didn’t take something into account during whatever design process there was. The other way may lead to the most elegant, clear code ever written, but if it’s dependent on people never making any kinds of mistakes (or incorrect judgment calls), I’ll skip it, thanks.

 

If you’re interested, Joe has a blog where he answers questions about SQL in his own, abrasive, insulting (if sometimes funny) style.

 

http://joecelkothesqlapprentice.blogspot.com/

 

How many of his “rules” have you broken to actually deliver usable software (within the confines of the tools you’re using)? Why is there so much support built into these tools to do things the “wrong way”? Right now, I’m specifically thinking about Crystal Reports: where are you doing most of your data manipulation – in SQL Server or in CR? I guess it could be argued that the limitations of these various development tools doesn’t mean that the various practices they (sometimes) force on you are correct. Could be, but ultimately most of us Just-Need-to-Get-it-Done. “In theory” is nice, but “in practice” pays the bills. Do you think your customers would accept the excuse that you wouldn’t generate some report for them because the reporting tool doesn’t have the ability to do what they wanted and putting it into SQL isn’t the correct way to do it?

 

As a side note, it seems like this is a distinct personality trait with some “computer” people in general. You know the type: really smart, could be really helpful to have on the team but they just don’t play well with others. Fanboys (and girls) of them will usually say things like, “I know online he can be rough, but it personal he’s great”. In other words, that just means he’s an asshole. Being blunt (as it’s sometimes described) is OK as long as it’s tempered with the understanding that it’s not an excuse to be an asshat, online or in person.

 

(I just hope the above isn’t taken as some argument for writing crappy code). Write the best code you can for the given problem and time constraints. Refactor mercilessly.

 

Links

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/channels/bi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201806814
http://joecelkothesqlapprentice.blogspot.com/
http://www.jamesbooth.com

 

There have been a lot of great sessions done over the years about Intellisense, builders, etc. (usually by Rick Schummer or Doug Hennig). Every time I've been able to sit in on these sessions, I end up leaving all geeked up to write some cool routine or code that will make my life easier. A few days go by and reality sets in - I don't really have the time to actually write any of that stuff. 6 months go by, someone shows some other slick utility they wrote and I get all excited about it again.

With that in mind, here are a few easy changes you can make (that won't take more than a few minutes) that can help save you some time. Just think how many times a day you type some of these things:

Tools > Intellisense Manager > Custom

CreateObject

In the Replace field, enter CO in the With field, enter CREATEOBJECT. Change the Type combo to Function. Then click Add.

MessageBox

Now type MB in the Replace field and MESSAGEBOX in the With field, again make sure the type combo is set to Function.

Now close the Intellisense Manager. At the command window enter:

USE (_foxcode) IN 0 AGAIN SHARED
SELECT FoxCode
APPEND BLANK
BROWSE

IF ENDIF

In the new record enter:

Type: U
Abbrev: IF
Cmd: {stmthandler}
Data: Double click on it and enter:
IF ~
<<lcSpace>>ENDIF

Save: T
The timestamp & UniqueID are optional.

SCAN ENDSCAN

APPEND BLANK

Type: U
Abbrev: SCAN
Cmd: {stmthandler}
Data: Double click on it and enter:
SCAN ~
<<lcSpace>>ENDSCAN

FOR ENDFOR

APPEND BLANK

Type: U
Abbrev: FOR
Cmd: {stmthandler}
Data: Double click on it and enter:
FOR ~
<<lcSpace>>ENDFOR

WITH

(can you guess?)

APPEND BLANK

Type: U
Abbrev: WITH
Cmd: {stmthandler}
Data: Double click on it and enter:
WITH ~
<<lcSpace>>ENDWITH

TRY CATCH

APPEND BLANK

Type: U
Abbrev: TC
Cmd: {stmthandler}
Data: Double click on it and enter:
TRY
   ~
CATCH TO loEx
ENDTRY

TRY CATCH FINALLY

APPEND BLANK

Type: U
Abbrev: TCF
Cmd: {stmthandler}
Data: Double click on it and enter:
TRY
   ~
CATCH TO loEx
FINALLY
ENDTRY

Close the browse window and the foxcode table.

Hotkeys:

This one will reset the dev. environment for you.

Select Tools > Macros. Click on New. Hit F4 as the key, enter "ClearIt" as the macro name. Paste this into the macro contents:

_genscrn=_foxcode{ENTER}
_foxcode{SPACEBAR}={SPACEBAR}""{ENTER}
set{SPACEBAR}development{SPACEBAR}on{ENTER}
execscript("do{SPACEBAR}while{SPACEBAR}txnlevel(0{BACKSPACE})>0"+chr(13)+"rollback"+chr(13)+"enddo"){ENTER}
clear{SPACEBAR}all{ENTER}
release{SPACEBAR}all{ENTER}
clear{SPACEBAR}program{ENTER}
set{SPACEBAR}procedure{SPACEBAR}to{ENTER}
set{SPACEBAR}classlib{SPACEBAR}to{ENTER}
clear{ENTER}
_foxcode=_genscrn{ENTER}

 

Hit OK.

Now try everything out - open a program window:

CO(
MB(

Hit the spacebar after these:

IF
SCAN
FOR
WITH
TC
TCF

 

Links

http://rickschummer.com/blog
http://doughennig.blogspot.com

 

Imagine this scenario: You want to create a simple user control that you can use in a few web pages. It incorporates a few JavaScript functions that change the UI slightly during a mouse click; pretty standard stuff. The script isn't particularly useful in other controls, so putting it into a common library doesn't make much sense. It could be broken out into it's own library, which can at least be cached by a browser. But that introduces another dependency in the hosting page - you have to remember to include a reference to this JS library before things will work. The easiest thing to do would be to just include the JS code inside the user control itself (I'm skipping the option of embedding it as a resource; maybe another day). Including the code in the control is pretty simple and seamless. Until you drop two instances of the same control on page. What you'll find (like I did) is that your JS code is now rendered one time for each control. That's not very cool. In fact, you run into this same issue even if you decide to move the code into it's own library - you end up with more than one reference to the library.

 

A relatively simple way around all this is the ClientScriptManager class that is available hanging off the Page object as ClientScript. It lets you register JS code to be rendered into the main page. You can also check for the existence of the registered code (to keep from registering it more than once, regardless of the number of controls on the page). In my case, since I'm just embedding the code right in the page, there are only two methods required for this: IsClientScriptBlockRegistered and RegisterClientScriptBlock.

 

The routines use the object type and the passed in name as a key; if you don't pass it into IsClientScriptBlockRegistered (or the other variants) the routines will use the Page's type. I'd suggest always passing in something besides the page type (for example, the user control type). This will keep you from running into conflicts if you happen to use the same registration name (although things will still break if you picked the same JS function names).

 

Here's what that might look like:

 

Coding Horror just had an article about moving his site to a new host running as a virtual server. I’ve got to say, I’m starting to become a big fan of this. When I was looking for a web host, as soon as I realized it was even an option, I started looking exclusively for a virtual private server. I get almost all of the benefits of a dedicated server without the price (although, I must say, there are some really good deals available for dedicated server hosting as well). I can install any software I want, configure it any way I’d like, and not have to go through a “control panel” app. to do it. It includes a Win 2003 Server license, so I don’t even have that expense.

 

The biggest limitation I’ve found is hard drive space. Most VPS solutions just don’t give you very much space. I’ve got 6 GB available on my site. While that’s not too bad, I would have preferred quite a bit more (15 GB would have been great). Once you start adding space, though, the monthly price starts ratcheting up (I think it’s a bit out of line for the value – thankfully 6 GB is something I can live with). I get 200 GB/month of bandwidth and 3 dedicated IP addresses. It runs $40/month, which isn’t too horrible. I’m guessing they must be hoping to get 5-10 VM’s per machine. That would seem to fit for a 72 GB drive w/RAID and the min. dedicated stats of 384 Megs of memory and 200 MHz of CPU.  A fully loaded box that all had a lot of traffic might be a little sluggish – thankfully I don’t think the box I’m currently on is anywhere near that (at least yet).

 

I’ve found the performance to be pretty reasonable. Of course, the VM for my site is idle most of the day so I’m not really pushing it <g>. Jeff’s site generates a huge amount of traffic; he had more visitors in a few seconds than I’ll get in a day (take a look at his traffic stats which are available as a link off the main Coding Horror page). When I was looking it appeared most VPS solutions are limited by the bandwidth per month available, 200-300 GB/month on average (a few sites offered more but had terrible reviews). At his level (maybe 2000GB/month based on the estimate someone posted of 5.7 Mbit/sec of traffic) I’d be tempted to want to just go with unmetered hosting (and once you hit that level, you’re really going to want to be on a dedicated box). There seems to be a bit of a margin here from various hosts (unmetered vs metered), so I guess YMMV.

 

Of course, there is nothing keeping you from then running a virtual server on your dedicated box. There is something really attractive about being able to just take a snapshot of the VM image and drop it on a new box if you need to scale performance (or run multiple copies of the image on a few boxes). Or, imagine your host running into connectivity issues. You could just take the VM image and move it to a backup host really quickly.

 

One huge thing to consider is the price of virtualization on performance. I found a really interesting article that went more in depth about it. Cliff notes version – he saw an approx. 40% performance hit on the total requests that a machine can handle. That may kill any fantasies about virtualizing a server for some of you <g>. But, like most things, there are tradeoffs which may still make it an attractive alternative.

 

 

Links

 
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000984.html
http://www.webperformanceinc.com/library/reports/LoadTestingVirtualizationPerformance/
http://www.galaxyvisions.com

 

I've had these notes about optimizing VFP code hanging around a long time (and added a few a little more recently). According to the date on it, most of this is from 8/1/2002. Wow!

Most of this came out of a data conversion project that would take 3-4 hours each time it was run (and during development we needed to run this a LOT so 3-4 hours would just kill productivity).

• () evals are much faster than macro substitution:
  
  REPLACE (lcField) WITH 1
  
  instead of
  
  REPLACE &lcField WITH 1
  
  2.5 - 3X faster
  
  Directly accessing a field:
  
  REPLACE field WITH 1
  
  is 8-10X faster than the REPLACE (lcField) WITH 1 code.
  
  
• Do multiple field updates in a single REPLACE.
  
  For example:
  
  REPLACE field WITH 1, field2 WITH 2, field3 WITH 3 IN TableName
  
  Instead of:
  
  REPLACE field1 WITH 1 IN TableName
  REPLACE field2 WITH 2 IN TableName
  REPLACE field3 WITH 3 IN TableName
  
  
• If you are doing COM interop, use WITH/ENDWITH instead of directly accessing object references - this keeps VFP from having to traverse the object hierarchy on each line. This can be significantly faster.
  
  
• SCATTER MEMVAR is up to 10X faster than SCATTER NAME, although SCATTER NAME provides better encapsulation. If you are doing this for a large number of records, SCATTER MEMVAR may be a much better choice.
  
  
• If you are doing a SELECT ... WHERE IN (SELECT ...) style query, check to see if it's functionally equivalent to an INNER JOIN. This can make a HUGE difference.
  
  
• CREATEOBJECT() is much faster than NEWOBJECT().
  
  
• Opening and closing tables is one of the slowest thing you can do. In the data conversion app. we had some code that opened a lookup table at the beginning of the function, then closed it at the end. The data conversion process was spending approx. 45 minutes of time in this routine alone. By opening the tables only once (and leaving them open), the processing time dropped to under 3 minutes (It was so much faster that I had to test this a few times to make sure I hadn't broken it).

 

OK, nothing really earth shattering here. But hopefully you'll find one or two of the above helpful at some point.

 

Once in a while I’ll get lucky and find a good sample of a solution to exactly the problem I’m having. Last Friday was my day for this. I’ve been working on a portal-style web application which includes security and logging on everything. I make some logging calls from within my global.asax file. Running ASP.NET web apps under development isn’t the fastest thing in the world and it’s always a bit of a problem to get a good feel for it’s speed in production. However, I had a few pages which felt particularly sluggish.

 

I’ve played around with various .NET code profilers and while they’ve all been OK, I haven’t committed to buying any of them. This time around I downloaded and installed ANTS Profiler from Red Gate. Once limitation that most profilers seem to have is that they require me to debug under IIS, which means I have to screw around with the code a bit to get it ready for deployment before I can look into any performance issues (although you can usually force them to fire up Cassini and profile it that way, it’s usually not very intuitive). So it was kind of nice to be able to profile an app. directly from ANTS.

 

After a quick profile test it was pretty clear the problem was in the logging code. There isn’t much going on here, grab some info. about the request (IP Address, page, time, user ID, etc.) create a connection, then create and run the insert SQL code. It was adding around 250ms to every page hit. I couldn’t do much to optimize this code, but I thought I might be able to create a new thread to run this on so the user wouldn’t have to wait while it ran. I found an excellent example of the exact issue by Peter Bromberg on the Egghead Café site: http://www.eggheadcafe.com/tutorials/aspnet/aa5ff306-16a1-4014-a51d-6ffde0894a0d/aspnet-request-logging-w.aspx

 

I didn’t need his connection or logging code, so I just snagged the thread class. Then I created a delegate for the logging method call.

 

My delegate code:

public delegate void SqlExecDelegate(SqlCommand command);

Then I just wrapped the call and passed in the SqlCommand variable I needed:

ThreadUtil.FireAndForget(new SqlExecDelegate(SqlExec), Command);

Here’s the code I grabbed from Peter – his article explains how it works in detail:

using System;
using System.Runtime.CompilerServices; 

namespace WirelessToyz.Utility
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Downloaded this class from:
    /// http://www.eggheadcafe.com/tutorials/aspnet/aa5ff306-16a1-4014-a51d-6ffde0894a0d/aspnet-request-logging-w.aspx
    /// </summary>
    public class ThreadUtil
    {
        private static AsyncCallback callback = new AsyncCallback(ThreadUtil.EndWrapperInvoke);
        private static DelegateWrapper wrapperInstance = new DelegateWrapper(ThreadUtil.InvokeWrappedDelegate);
 
        private static void EndWrapperInvoke(IAsyncResult ar)
        {
            wrapperInstance.EndInvoke(ar);
            ar.AsyncWaitHandle.Close();
        }
 
        public static void FireAndForget(Delegate d, params object[] args)
        {
            wrapperInstance.BeginInvoke(d, args, callback, null);
        } 

        private static void InvokeWrappedDelegate(Delegate d, object[] args)
        {
            d.DynamicInvoke(args);
        } 

        private delegate void DelegateWrapper(Delegate d, object[] args);
    }
}

I immediately saw a difference in my app. The pages felt a noticeable snappier. While it still takes 250ms to run my logging code, I no longer have to make the user wait for it.

Links

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/tutorials/aspnet/aa5ff306-16a1-4014-a51d-6ffde0894a0d/aspnet-request-logging-w.aspx

 

This is one of those things that's really easy to do, but not particularly clear the first time you run across it (well, it wasn't clear to me at least). There are times when you need to access ASP.NET created controls from within your JavaScript code. In the ASPX page you may have set the ID of a button control to "btnAdd". However, when you run the page the control name gets mangled into something like ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_btnAdd. In order to reference it in your JavaScript, you need that mangled name. To get it, just embed something like this in your JavaScript code:

function DoSomething()
{
    var addButton = document.getElementById('<%= btnAdd.ClientID %>');
    if (addButton)
        alert('<%= btnAdd.ClientID %>');
}

 

When the page is run, the ASP.NET eval engine will replace the ID with the correct one.

 

I’ve been trying to get the (highly regarded) CopySourceAsHtml add-in to work under Visual Studio to make it easier to post code samples. Every time I tried loading it, it was failing with:

The Add-in 'CopySourceAsHtml' failed to load or caused an exception.
Would you like to remove this Add-in?
If you choose yes, the file it was loaded from, '\\wtz-srv-dc01\Users\paul.mrozowski\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Addins\CopySourceAsHtml.AddIn', will be renamed.
Error Message:
Error number: 8013150a

I tried downloading the source, recompiling, making some suggested changes to the control references. Nothing seemed to help. As soon as I attempted to activate the add-in, it was failing. Then it suddenly occurred to me: what if it’s related to the fact that “My Documents” is on a network drive? To test this idea, I created a new local folder, then when into Tools > Options > Environment > Add-in/Macros Security. I added a new local folder which had a copy of the add-in and exited VS and restarted. Finally, I when to Tools > Add-ins and reselected the CopySourceAsHtml add-in. No errors!

I copied and pasted some code (and selected Override for the font to add Courier New as a secondary font). (random code shown below).

 

        /// <summary>

        /// Process events from the grid

        /// </summary>

        /// <param name="source"></param>

        /// <param name="e"></param>

        /// <developer>Paul Mrozowski</developer>

        /// <created>10/16/2007</created>

        protected void grdTemplates_ItemCommand(object source, Telerik.WebControls.GridCommandEventArgs e)

        {           

            if (e.CommandName == "Edit")

                this.EditRecord(e.Item);

            else if (e.CommandName == "Cancel")

                this.grdTemplates.EditIndexes.Clear();

            else if (e.CommandName == "Add")

                this.AddRecord();

            else if (e.CommandName == "Test")

                this.TestQuery(e);

            else if (e.CommandName == "Update")

                this.UpdateRoles(e);

        }

 

Here's a screenshot as a comparison:

 

 

 

Links:

CopySourceAsHtml

http://www.jtleigh.com/people/colin/software/CopySourceAsHtml/

Getting it to run under VS 2008 Beta 2

 http://diditwith.net/2007/08/16/CopySourceAsHtmlInVisualStudio2008.aspx

 

There is a ton of great .NET content available on the web; everything from simple code snippets to full blown apps. I really appreciate that people put the time into this stuff and make it available. But I have one request: would it kill you to include the namespace references in your sample code? There are thousands of classes in .NET - I hate having to try and figure out where these classes are hiding in order to get my code to compile (esp. since I’m normally looking at this code because I'm not familiar with the class or classes required to do whatever it is I'm trying to accomplish. Having said that, I never realized VS would actually help resolve these references for me. If you right-click on a type (in this case, I right-clicked on File), there is a Resolve Namespace option on the content menu:

 

Very nice!
 

When I was thinking about putting up a blog, one of the things I really debated was if I wanted to create two different blogs: one which focused on VFP, other on .NET. I was (and still am) a bit worried that the VFP content will drive away .NET developers, and the .NET content will scare away VFP developers. Ultimately, I decided to just include both in the same blog. Since I’m using both on a daily basis, there is a lot of overlap for me between the two. Then I’d have to decide which blog a post was more applicable for. And where would I put content that might be applicable to both (for example, I’ve got some things about SQL Server I’m planning on talking about)? Hopefully I can make this interesting to both sets (and if not, that’s OK too). Well, I guess there are probably 3 or 4 people who are like me, using both VFP and .NET so this might be perfect for them .
 

I sent myself a few code snippets and a couple of blog ideas from work (Outlook using Word integration). To keep the code formatting I just pasted the content into Live Writer and told it to keep the HTML formatting. That turned out to be a bad idea - I forgot what a horrible job Word does with HTML markup. I ended up leaving the code markup as-is, since I don't want to manually reformat it, but I did change the rest of it. Reminder to self: "Don't paste from Word".
 

A while back I needed a routine which would display the first few hundred characters of a longer chunk of text. Obviously, it's easy enough to do that with the Substring method of a string. However, I wanted to do this on a word boundary (I didn't want to end up with half of the word being displayed). So I wrote a simple routine which broke up the string into an array (using Split()), then rebuilt the string (keeping track of the length along the way). Maybe 25 lines or code or so. It seemed to work OK, so I was good to go.

The other day I realized I needed to adjust the code to strip out HTML markup before displaying the text - you can imagine how "nice" that might look if I happened to chop off an ending tag somewhere. I knew I had a third party library to do this; there are a lot of really useful little routines hiding in the West Wind Web Store .NET 2.0. So I took a look through the library and found what I was looking for. While looking for it, I noticed another routine which appeared to do exactly the same thing I wanted. Except it was like 5 lines and much easier to understand. Doh!

30 seconds later I rewrote my routine. Here it is...

        public static string TruncateString(string source, int maxLength, string ending)
        {
            // Do we even have to truncate it?

            if (source.Length <= maxLength)
                return source;

            string text = source.Substring(0, maxLength);

            text = text.Substring(0, text.LastIndexOf(" ")); 

            return text;
        }

 

We had our monthly FoxPro user group meeting last night, and, like always, there were some cool new things shown and talked about that I’ve now got to play with. Cathy Pountney was kind enough to drive over from the Grand Rapids area to do a session on extending VFP 9’s report writer through extensions and hooking into the generation process with listeners. She demo’d some code which added a new print dialog box which allowed the user to pick/configure the printer before printing, being able to print a document range (ex. 1-10, 11), “Print to Fit” which resizes a report to fit on 1 page, duplex printing, booklet printing, and being able to print multiple pages per sheet of paper. Really cool stuff. She’ll be giving this same presentation at Southwest Fox next week, so if you’re planning on going, don’t miss this session.

One of the “hey, I didn’t know about that command” that came up was SYS(2600). This command lets you pass in a integer (pointer) and then returns the memory pointed to by the pointer as a string. It can also write data into the memory point. This is pretty slick since it allows you to easily interface with win32 API calls that require you to pass in pointers to structures, or use API calls that return pointers to structures. By setting/getting this memory as a string, you can then easily parse apart the structure to get the data back.

To be able to do anything useful with this, you’re also going to need the ability to allocate/de-allocate some memory (and get a pointer to it). The easiest way to do this is through a few API calls:

#DEFINE GMEM_ZEROINIT     0x40    && Init memory contents to zero

DECLARE INTEGER GlobalAlloc IN kernel32.dll ;
        INTEGER wFlags, ;
        INTEGER dwBytes       

DECLARE INTEGER GlobalFree IN kernel32.dll ;
        INTEGER hMem 

lnPointer = GlobalAlloc(GMEM_ZEROINIT, 110)

?lnPointer

IF lnPointer > 0

   * You should see a a bunch of squares (nulls)

   ?SYS(2600, lnPointer, 110)
   SYS(2600, lnPointer, 100, REPLICATE("X", 100))

   * Now you should see 100 X's followed by 10 nulls

   ?SYS(2600, lnPointer, 110) 

   GlobalFree(lnPointer)

ENDIF          

A side note: You may see some apps use LocalAlloc/LocalFree instead of GlobalAlloc/GlobalFree. They are essentially the same thing at this point (that is, there isn’t any difference between the two of them). This is one of those “backwards compatibility” things. If you want to know more: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms810603.aspx

There were a couple of other cool utilities/products that came up as well that I’ll be trying out/writing about.

 

  I was doing some searching the other day for pricing on MSDN Professional vs MSDN Premium editions, comparing what was included, etc. Pro seemed to be around $1000 vs upwards of $2000 for Premium (depending on the specific version picked). Here's a comparision of the differences. For me, I was really hoping to be able to get Vista, Outlook, and things like Expression. Unfortunately, those are only available with the Premium edition. $1000 was doable, but there was no way I was going to spend $2K on software (it's still not a bad deal, all things considered). I could get the Pro version and just buy what I wanted, but that still pushed the price up to the Premium edition range.

I remember running across some great deals for the MSDN Universal subscription a few years ago on E-bay, so I thought I'd poke around there to see if there was something similar for the Premium edition. I ran across an ad for the Premium version for around $950. "Not bad" I thought, then started looking at the description to make sure it wasn't the Educational version or anything weird. Part of the way down I read some of the requirements: I needed to agree to develop a commercial software app., place a product announcement on my website, make a best effort to pass one of the MS software tests.

Hey! That suddenly started sounding really familiar. Yep, those end up being the same requirements for Microsoft's Empower program. That you can get directly from Microsoft. For $375.

Yep, these guys are really just signing you up for the Empower program for a mere $525 more (handling charge, I guess). Un-Effing believable.

 

Do you remember the show "Connections" with James Burke? It used to be on TLC at some point (according to the linked Wikipedia article, 1997). It was a show about seemingly unrelated things that were all connected. For example, how a Polish dirt farmer in 1743 stubbed his toe on a sharp rock, which led to a nasty infection, which led to someone creating the Pierogi, which led to the German's bombing Pearl Harbor*, which led to the Ironman Triathlon. Or something like that. Anyway, I really thought it was a cool show and it seems software development (and I.T. in general) follow the same sorts of patterns.

Take this blog for example. A set of seemingly disconnected events** led me to it. People have been blogging for years now. I'm a Johnny-come-lately to the game. Why? And why now? For me, it started with e-mail sites like Hotmail being blocked at work...

(for those that don't get the historical set of connections example, take web surfing as another example. How many times have you started searching for some Javascript code only to find yourself 3 hours later at some Japanese midget porn site. That happens at least once a week for me).

* Yes, I know the German's didn't bomb Pearl Harbor. Everyone knows it was the Swedes.

** I reserve the right to jump around a lot. And I'll try to eventually get around to tying everything together. Either that or get bored with the whole thing and stop. Definitely one or the other.

 

Just a test to see how things look. And check to see if they work. There are still a few issues to iron out, but it's mostly functional.