Archive for the 'misc' Category
Mail problems
December 3rd, 2009I’ve had some email problems lately (thanks Alan for the heads up). I retrieve my emails with Gmail for both dbdesc and dtsdoc email addresses. However a couple of mailboxes have been piling up email until they finally stop working. Somehow the accounts got misconfigured.
I’ve already fixed the problem and I’m reviewing the emails. Please [...]
System.Data.OraClient deprecated in .NET 4.0
June 17th, 2009It seems that Microsoft is dropping their Oracle ADO.NET Data Provider and suggest to use a third-party one.
The Decision
After carefully considering all the options and talking to our customers, partners, and MVPs it was decided to deprecate OracleClient as a part of our ADO.NET roadmap.
I kind of understand this decision, they want to improve [...]
Split SQL Server DTS packages documentation in several files using dtsdoc 1.2.5
May 4th, 2009Until now, when documenting various DTS packages using DTSDoc you got one big HTML file which included all the packages. This was no problem as long as there were not too many packages.
If you try to document many DTS packages, the resulting HTML file could be so big that can take a while to load [...]
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 [...]
