Random writings, thoughts, tools, and ideas....

One thing about being a developer is that at some point you will have to work with databases/datastores. It's a fact of life (like death and taxes). The thing about these databases is that they all have connections strings to get to them, but the problem is how do you get the connection string? A popular website is http://www.connectionstrings.com/ which lists them and you can then copy, paste and modify those for your own needs.

However there is a problem with this, in that it's open to errors during the modification (assuming you can copy and paste without error) and that there is no nice test system for your environment. Well fear not, Windows (I've known about this since Windows 2000 and can confirm it works on XP, Vista and 2003 fine) has a great feature for finding out connection strings, and testing them.

To do this you create a new empty file somewhere (desktop is good, cause you can go right click New -> Text Document). The trick is to make sure the file extension is udl (i.e. connection.udl). Now you can double click this file and using the (possibly) familiar connection wizard/odbc thing to set and test the values the values:
Once you click OK the window disappears.

So what good is that? Well if you now open that file in notepad you'll find the connection string in plain text right there! With all the right values for your environment! Anyway happy connecting!

Update 10 Jan 2008: If you are doing this on x64 machines and getting issues this may help: http://blogs.msdn.com/snehadeep/archive/2008/01/10/running-a-32-bit-data-link-properties-udl-in-64-bit-box.aspx

For the sake of the series I am going to just highlight a few points. For real concrete stuff see:

• http://dotnetwithme.blogspot.com/2007/05/what-new-in-net-35.html
• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332048(VS.90).aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/07/27/what-s-new-in-wpf-3-5-here-s-fifteen-cool-features.aspx

There is a lot of new language features in 3.5, most important to highlight for this series is LINQ. Moving along to the more shiny information there is significant work put into integration of AJAX, WPF (XBabs support in Firefox, can work with cookies now), WCF (more WS* support, general syndication support, special model for web development,  and Silverlight. WCF + WF and WCF + AJAX now play very well together (lots of support for each other now). There is also support for new cryptography stuff (nice), peer to peer development. Interesting WinForms now supports the same model as ASP.NET for authentication.

All coming 2008!
Next Game
Next Project (not a game!)
And in the same vein as the next project, something a little different.

I like it all! In fact I am a tingle of excitement over it.

MSCRM 4.0 is now RTM!

Read more http://blogs.msdn.com/mscrmfreak/archive/2007/12/16/microsoft-dynamics-crm-4-0-hits-rtm.aspx

So after letting the auto tagger run all last night I now have my collection of music in a decent state. Next is the cleaning up of the collection. To do that I went and downloaded Media Library Organiser plugin. This great plugin renames files, builds a neat folder structure and removes duplicates. You can specify what the structure is (by default [Artist]\[Album]\[Track No] [Title].[File Extension]) and you can turn on/off the duplicate removal etc... Since this is all tagged base you desperately need to make sure your tags are done right first. This takes just a few minutes for thousands of audio files to be cleaned up.

WinAmp 5.5 was release recently with a great new plug-in called AutoTag. This plugin samples your music (the music itself, not the tags, not the file or filename, the actual music) then sends that to Gracenote who identify it and send all the tag information back so any music WinAmp can play (including music videos) gets correctly tagged and sorted.

Now add the album art download plug-in and your MP3 collection is looking great :)

These two features (and the revised layout, and outlook like popups) have made me a winamp fan again (after a few years of using Windows Media Player).

Get it from Winamp.com!

There is a scene in Jurassic Park where Ian Malcolm (If I remember right, he is the mathematician/chaos theorist) criticizes Jurassic Park for not earning the right to clone the dinosaurs as they just "Stood on the shoulders of those before them". Well that may be true when working with millions of years old dinosaurs, but in development standing on the shoulders of the greats makes life better for you as a developer and for your clients.

Being a Dot Net developer means that those giants include the Microsoft patterns and practices team. Well what do they do?

We talk with a large number of Microsoft customers, partners, and consultants to understand the commonly occurring scenarios and the technical challenges associated with them. Then we discover and harvest the solution patterns and engineering practices (including anti-patterns) that have proved successful in addressing these scenarios.
Once we understand the scenarios and technical challenges, we work with product and technology teams across Microsoft, industry experts, and with customers and partners, to build guidance that reflects both the current, practical state of the technology and that is also aligned with future Microsoft technology plans. Often, the underlying scenarios and solutions guidance ends up influencing future Microsoft product direction.
Most of our projects are conducted in CodePlex communities. This allows continuous input from the development community at large and keeps us honest. We call this approach, “customer connected engineering” and it ensures that what we deliver actually meets the needs of our customers. We also ship the source code to nearly everything we deliver, usually along with a license agreement that encourages source level adoption and customization.
From http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-za/practices/bb969103(en-us).aspx

That's great for marketing but for developers it means that they produce tools, frameworks and documentation (guides, proven practices etc...). My personal favorite from them is a set of components called the Enterprise Library which provides amazing code for logging (log4net eat your heart out), database access, exception handling, cache handling, cryptography, policy management (ala AD policies in your app) and validation. It really is amazing stuff. Two nice examples are the database application block, you can connect to a database, run a query and get the result in result set and close the database all following best practices with a tool to change the connection string (cause it's not hard coded so your users may need it) all in 2 lines of code! The validation block provides attributes to decorate your classes with to enforce validation with no additional code. You can get all of that from http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480453.aspx and much more from http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-za/practices/bb969097(en-us).aspx.

There is the logical place on the Microsoft site but if you installed Visual Studio 2008 you have it already (including 2.0, 3.0) all in 32 and 64 bit. Now in VS 2005 this was under the Visual Studio folder in Program Files. With VS 2008 it moved to being part of the Windows SDK, so you can now find it in (assuming you installed to default locations, else modify as needed):
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages

BTW one nice feature of using this version, is that you have all 60Mb already downloaded. So when you launch it, and it says you need to download a bunch of data - well you give it a second cause it doesn't.

One of the most powerful tools in a developers kit (and an essential for CCF development) is reflector. Up until now I always assumed (incorrectly) plug-in's added other language support. That is until I stumbled on to a great codeplex site. This site lists a large number of plug-in's be them on codeplex or not.

The site is: http://www.codeplex.com/reflectoraddins

Some of the nice ones there:

• Code Metrics
• Code Review Tools
• Dumping of source code to file
• Silverlight support
• SQL 2005 (for CLR integration) support
• Unit and mock testing
• BizTalk Support
• A few diagram and charting tools
• Powershell support (as a language)

There are a lot of other nice ones but those are really great.

In my previous post on BioShock I commented that the VitaChambers were a big gameplay issue for me since it made it far too easy. What I didn't comment on was how they broke the story completely. Why am I the only person who can use them? I know my character is special, but if I am so special that makes me the only one who can use them, why are they scattered around rapture like candy?

Thinking more into this, the answer to a lot of gameplay issues actually would be to drop the number of VitaChambers (2 per level, maybe) and seriously drop the number of bad guys. Then enable bad guys to respawn at the VitaChambers too, unless caught by a little sister (and thus drained of adam). This opens up some nice avenues of gameplay, one it slows it down a lot to enable you to actually be tactical. It lowers the number of bad guys allowing for more distinct-ness in them. It makes little sister harvesting an interesting issue, do you kill them early to get adam or let them run around as cleanup crews for and then only kill them later.

Despite that dream which will never happen, one nice thing has happened. A patch for BioShock has been released and does support turning off VitaChambers completely. More details on the patch at http://www.2kgames.com/cultofrapture/pcpatch.html