Archive for the 'misc' Category
How to reduce the size of your MSI installer
October 1st, 2007I use WiX to build the installer packages for dbdesc and dtsdoc. Today, I’ve reduced the size of both installers by 20%. How?
It turns out that the WiX tutorial states it clearly:
We also have to include the icon we want to use in the shortcuts. Note that the Id identifier has to carry the same […]
Advanced code visualization add-in for Visual Studio
July 24th, 2007My friend Jon has released a new exciting product for C, C++ and C# Visual Studio developers. It’s called codekana and it enhances the Visual Studio experience boosting your productivity.
I’ve been using a beta version of codekana for several weeks and once you have used it for just some hours you just can’t go on […]
Problem dropping a user in SQL 2005
May 15th, 2007Today I’ve encountered a problem trying to drop a user from a database. I kept getting this error:
Msg. 15138 The database principal owns a database role and cannot be dropped
So it looked like the user owned a database schema. To find out the schemas that a user owns I’ve used this query:
SELECT * […]
ExecutionEngineException nightmare
March 28th, 2007Last week, a potential customer of dtsdoc reported a new error. It was an ExecutionEngineException. Let me tell you that this is one of the worse exceptions you can get from a .NET application.
To begin with, this exception cannot be catched, which means you don’t get a nice call stack or any other useful info […]
vi power for die-hard Windows users
February 7th, 2007I’ve been enjoying the vi input model since Jon released the first version of ViEmu for Visual Studio and, just like he warned me, at first it was a bit difficult to change my typing habits. However, soon I began to appreciate the vi way of doing things and I started to take advantage of […]
Firebird 2.0 is finally out
November 17th, 2006This week, the Firebird project has finally released version 2.0 final.
Although this version comes with lots of improvements and changes, I think that dbdesc should be able to document 2.0 databases without problems. I will try to find time this very weekend to test it.
Here are the release notes and download page.
UPDATE: Even though you […]
Dealing with Spam
October 18th, 2006Steph, founder of LandLordMax Property Management Software, has posted a very descriptive post about the problems of dealing with email spam.
I just can not imagine receiving thousands of spam emails every single day. I’m not even close to that amount of emails. I used to receive less than one hundred per day (fingers crossed!).
To deal […]
Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.4 and new theme
September 2nd, 2006I’ve finally managed to upgrade my blog to the latest version of WordPress (I was still running 1.5.2!). I’ve also updated the blog theme to match the look of my products.
Just to be sure to not break anything and because I had a VM with MySQL and Apache that I setup some time ago, I […]
MSDE not supported on Windows Vista
August 14th, 2006This may be old news for you, but I’ve just discovered that MSDE will not be supported on Vista. After thinking about it, it is not a big surprise. Microsoft is promoting SQL Server 2005 really hard. Indeed, SQL Server 2005 Express edition seems a lot better than the old MSDE. It has no workload […]
Happy TiddlyWiki user
August 12th, 2006Last week I checked out TiddlyWiki as it has been mentioned several times on JoS forums recently.
I’m impressed. It so useful and easy to use that I’m using it as the main way to communicate my progress on a custom development project I’m working on.
It’s basically a self-contained wiki. Just one html file. No setup […]
