A day in the life of...

Hi all I have finally reached a point where I can dedicate a few hours each today to "something new" and have decided that the ECO book I have always wanted to write would be great fun. My first idea is to create 2 or 3 separate items: Title: ECO jump start This would be in paper / PDF format and would contain a set of exercises for a new user to follow in order to get started with ECO as quickly as possible. It would basically cover creating a simple model, prototyping using auto-forms, using the different handles, databinding, parent-child grids, creating/evolving the DB, OCL / code derived / reverse derived attributes, and stuff like that. Title: ECO API This would be an electronic format which would basically be a "Press F1" reference. Title: ECO book This would either be a paper/pdf format or, if possible, part of the ECO API document. It would be a technical overview of the framework + its services and abilities. I imagine it might be similar to my ECO Ser

I have just released a minor update to ECO extensions. It contains a fix for a bug that would prevent the DirtyObjectCatcher from catching modified objects for MDI child forms.

I recently developed a simple support application that allows users on a PC to provide a one-off security number to a Pocket PC user and when entered the PPC will perform a specific support function. I used the same class to generate these security codes in both the desktop and compact framework applications, tested it quite thoroughly and it all seemed to work fine. However once deployed it became evident that the codes provided by our support department were being rejected by the PPC as invalid. So what went wrong? Seeing as the same class was used for both applications I thought it would be okay to test the encoding/decoding of command numbers on only a single platform, and this was my mistake! The routines use string.GetHashCode() to add a checksum to the end of the security codes just to prevent the user from performing actions without authorisation. For reasons I cannot imagine the implementation of string.GetHashCode() is different in the compact framework from the one in t

This post is really a reminder to myself, so that I can find the information quickly for the next time I reformat my hard drive! To run a website with a root path in Visual Studio 2005 follow these steps: Tools->External tools menu Click Add Title = Webserver Command = C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\WebDev.WebServer.EXE Arguments = /port:8080 /path:$(ProjectDir) Tick "Use output window" Whenever you need the webserver running just open your project and go to Tools->Webserver.

I occasionally find it annoying that I cannot specify at which point in a class's constructor I wish to invoke the base constructor. Having C# always invoke it before any of the code in my descendant constructor is executed sometimes causes me problems. Considering .NET is capable of calling the ancestor constructor at any point I wondered why C# wont allow it. I contacted Anders Hejlsberg and he was kind enough to reply, unfortunately he seems to have answered a question I didn't ask :-) Anyway, I have been deleting some old emails today and I came across his response, which he gave me permission to publish: The problem with Delphi's model (allowing constructors to be called on an already constructed object) is that it makes it impossible to have provably immutable objects. Immutability is an important concept because it allows applications to hand objects to an external party without first copying those objects and still have a guarantee that the objects won't be m

Well, SQL Server amazes me, but not because I am impressed! Today I wrote an application that does the following: 01) Find all ZIP files in a specific folder 02) Open each ZIP file in turn 03) Extract an XML file from the ZIP into an array of bytes 04) Insert that data into a table There are 1,978 files in this folder and the XML within each ZIP file is around 2MB in size. I ran this app and was really surprised at how soon my PC started to crawl, it was so slow that it was taking over 10 seconds to switch between MSN and a Skype text-chat window. So I decided to monitor the process..... Importing the zip data into SQL Server took a total of 19 minutes and 15 seconds (this includes unzip time). What concerns me is that SQL Server's RAM usage went up to 830MB at its peak, this is what was crippling my PC. Twenty minutes after my app had finished SqlSevr.exe was still holding over 700MB of RAM, I then restarted my PC. SQL Server was using more RAM than I had available

Today my baby girl looked at me, said "DaDa" for the first time ever, and then giggled. What a great day! :-)