“You are making my point!”

I had a great time at the Boston .NET User Group event last week. There were about 30-40 people joining me on the thrilling adventure of BizTalk. Here is the slide deck for you the download. And feel free to email me with questions. You will find my email address in the cover page of the slide deck.

After months of fight with my ISP, I finally got my blog back. For the few lonely souls who read my blog, well, the wait is over……

I have always been a fan of ISNULL. Recently a boring (not to mention unpleasant) task of updating someone else’s stored procedures fell onto my lap. The original developer used COALESCE extensively through out the code. Half way through my search and replace, I started thinking, maybe I should performance-test these two techinques. I am not exactly sure how the internals of these two work, but it must be some kind of variation of CASE WHEN statements. And I have an inkling that ISNULL will be faster. It doesn’t spell easier for nothing!

Of course these days before you actually do anything, you always GOOGLE first. Surprise! A search on “ISNULL vs. COALESCE” turns out 800 entries. Adam Machanic’s post was the most interesting one. But the general consensus is that ISNULL is 10-20% faster than COALESCE. So my suspicion is correct. However, Adam’s beef with ISNULL is that it is doesn’t comform with ANSI SQL standard. It is ture, however these scripts that I am dealing with will not be ported to any non-SQL Server database in a million years. So ISNULL is the obvious winner here.

“Replace All?” 

“Yes!”

I attended last week’s Connecticut .NET User Group meeting in Microsoft’s Farmington, CT office to hear a presentation on SQL Server 2005 and BI, but ended up giving the talk on Open XML. The original speaker didn’t show up. I happened to have my laptop with me, and my Open XML presentation still hot from the stove. So I went up and asked SB (the organizer) if I can give the talk so long as people are already here. He was more than happy to have someone talk about something, anything. So I delivered the presentation to a roomful of fellow .NETers. It was an exciting and fun experience.

You can download the slides from here.

I am giving a presentation on Office 2007 Open XML format in the Code Camps 6 event held at Microsoft office in Waltham, MA. Here is the whole schedule. And the following is my session:

Technical Areas

http://cl1p.net: This is an Internet clipboard. If you are like me, you probably are constantly frustrated by not being able to paste more than 10 lines of code into the MSN message window and IM it to your co-workers. Cl1p.net is such a simple yet useful solution to this problem. It is highly recommended. I just wonder how they make money; and the same can be said to the next tool.

http://shrinkster.com: A very simple tool to condense those horribly long URLs into only 3 letters. Mathmatically it seems impossible. Using 26 characters plus 10 digits, you can have at most 36 x 36 x 36 = 46,656 combinations. Yet I would expect people are throwing (or will throw) a far greater number of URLs at shrinkster. Apparently there is a index/lookup table behind shrinkster that generates a unique 3-letter code to your input. Perhaps it is just at its starting stage and the number of records in that database is still low. As more and more people use it, you might expect soon we will venture into 4-letter territory. But still, it is a great tool, especially when you are trying to tell someone a URL over the phone.

What impresses me the most is the simplicity of these tools. These are incredibly simple and yet powerful ideas, kind of like the Internet itself.

RegShot, pointed me to me by Iainer Munoz, a DirectSound guru. This free tool let you take 2 snapshots of your Windows registry and compare them. It prints out a nice laid-out HTML page for the difference. It comes very handy if you are trying to figure out what changes have been made to the registry by a program. I am trying to get my Bluetooth earphone to work with my laptop, and this tool was very helpful. More to come on this little project.

Just spent 20 minutes installing WordPress. I am not a PHP guy, but I had my fair share of Perl and MySQL experience back in the days. But I have to say this is rather unexpectedly easy. I was bracing myself for at least three hours of obscure configuation file tweaking. But hey, here we are!

I was going to give .Text a try. But I guess connecting to MySQL would’ve been a stretch, given how much the code relies on stored procedures, and how limited the stored procedure is supported in MySQL. It ran fairly well on my local XP laptop with SQL Server 2005 though.

 Anyways, here it is. My first post!