After a while (busy days…) I’ve got a new book: Beginning SQL Server 2005 Programming by Robert Vieira.

I’m not considering myslef a SQL Server expert but to be honest I was afraid of this beginning word in the title. Yet I’ve been using SQL Server for a couple of years (apart from Java, C#, etc. – so not full time SQL developing). Also I attended a few SQL related courses when I was at the university. So I should have quite solid theoretical and pratctical background. However, as I was not working with SQL Server full time I decided to give that book a bash. You can always stop reading if you don’t like the book

That was really good choice! I’m still in the middle of the book but I’ve refreshed some basics on normalization, SQL Server storage, learned a few tips and tricks, possible approached, and of course learned a lot of things I’ve either forgot or never knew. I will probably forget some of what I’ve learnt but it will always be possible to get that book from the shelf and read about such an aspect.

Highly recommended!

This will be the first time for me. I’ve never been to this conference but heard it’s decent – good speakers, lots of information is passed, highly developing. We’ll see how it will be but I expect to get back home overwhelmed with new knowledge, both theoretical and practical.

Is anyone of you, readers of this blog, attending this conference too?

If you are reading this post or my blog in general, you probably are a software enginner, programmer, designer – a person who spends considerable amount of time at their desk, similar to me.

I work like that full time so 8 hours a day but there are days when I need to stay longer – 10 hours or even more. What happens to my body in the meantime is… nothing really interesting – I sit and try to do my job. From time to time there’s not anough time to take a break (busy days at project). The other day I find myself so absorbed with work that a couple of hours pass like a blinking of an eye. This is really not healthy (neck aches) and in longer perspective can be really harmful (Repetitive Strain Injury, a.k.a. RSI).

I’ve been using a tool that reminds me to take a break; it’s Workrave. It is a program that assists in the recovery and prevention of RSI. It frequently alerts to take micro-pauses, rest breaks and restricts the user to their daily limit. Personally I find it caring too much, whenever I start working on something I’m receiveing an annoying pop up which tells me to hold off and give a break to my eyes, shoulder and neck. That’s not a problem though because it can be configured so that the breaks occur less frequently.

Highly recommended – visit Workrave homepage, download it and start using

P.S. Maybe you know a different way/tool that motivates to take short breaks. If it’s true, can you share it with the others?

Yesterday I wrote about a problem I came across using AddThis service. Today I had a new issue.

This is an example of the code generated by AddThis:

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It’s said what you need to do is to include it in your page and AddThis will do all the work for you. Now, it didn’t in my case…

After my fix from yesterday all worked perfect but the problem occured when HTTPS \ SSL was used on IE – I was getting the following alert:

Solution

The reason for the problem was the page was delivered using secure channel (SSL) but there was a link to an external JS library (AddThis widget) which was not secure (it was referenced with http://). Again I consider that as a bug with AddThis – if they supply you with ready-to-go code it should work disregarding wheter HTTP or HTTPS is used. Google Analytics serves a dynamic code, which prevents from that issue. There’s a note on that on AddThis help, but you get there when you get issues only.

Anyhow, I followd Google Analytics approach and modified the AddThis code so it looks as below:

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That really works! I’m going to report that issue to AddThis authors. I hope they will make a change and nobody else has problems with that.

AddThis is a great service – it allows robust integration with online services, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, del.icio.us. What you need to do is to get your button’s code on AddThis homepage and use it in your project. Additionally you can configure the widget; you can refer to AddThis API, where you can find needed information and examples.

I created a component which I included on a couple of pages. I was very happy to use it until I started testing my pages on different browsers. It turned out there was a problem on IE (only; why didn’t that surprise me…); in two of three places it worked just fine but in one place I was getting JavaScript error:

As usual JavaScript error message on IE gave little (if not zero) information on the error. The only statement to give was the problem was on AddThis side. Unfortunately debugging their code was not the best case because the referenced library was obfuscated and (rather not) dedicated to a human being.

Solution

Because the problem occured on one page only it was reasonable that some DOM structure or referenced JavaScript code broke it. So I removed piece by piece from that page and at the end it turned out was I used AddThis widget inside this

I renamed the ID of that div to something else, which FIXED THE PROBLEM.

Now, of course I could use a different ID of that div but why should I be forced to do so? I’d consider this issue as a bug in AddThis; if their code creates or uses DOM elements with some divs, they should be given unique IDs, e.g. a hash. Only this way can they be sure they can save a few ours to a person who tries to use their (REALLY NICE) feature.

Solution

I used Firefox and Firebug to find out the container that kept the toolbar (see below).

Once I learned the identifier of that container I know what CSS definition should be added to the page that contained the ReportViewer:

That’s it!

Basically I had a table which looked like this

What I wanted was to select all as one row as a set of items separated with a comma, where an item was ‘id: name’. The items had to be sorted by the id. So the result was supposed to look as below:

Solution

Initially I tried to write one SELECT:

SELECT
STUFF
(
	(
	SELECT ', ' + cast(id AS NVARCHAR(max)) + ': ' + name
	FROM People
	ORDER BY Id
	FOR XML PATH ('')
	),1,1,''
)

The problem here was FOR XML PATH escaped characters that could break the XML (e.g. ‘<' was replaced with '<'), which was not acceptible for me.

I looked for another solution but whatever I tried didn't work because of the ORDER BY statement which can't be used in a subquery or inline view.
Finally I decided to use a temporary table filling it with correct data and then create the final result. Here is the code:

DECLARE @res NVARCHAR(max)
SET @res = ''

CREATE TABLE #Result ( item nvarchar(max) )

INSERT INTO #Result
SELECT CAST(Id AS NVARCHAR(max)) + ': ' + Name AS item
FROM People
ORDER BY id

SELECT @res = @res + item + ', ' from #Result
SELECT substring(@res,1,len(@res)-1) as Result

If you find a better solution can you please post it as a comment? I could use in in future Thanks in advance!

Wireless Configuration
Incorrect MFC DLL version installed on this system; minimum requirement is MFC SP4 Dlls.

The message wouldn’t stop popping up, rebooting didn’t help.

Solution

Google was not much of help there. The best advice found was this; it didn’t help though. Finally I decided to remove Dell Wireless Manager because… it had the same icon that this annoying pop-up This helped!

At the moment I can’t do much more about the wireless because my router is in the service. When it’s back I’m going to reinstall the software for wireless and I hope all works grand. If I have any problems I’ll update this post.

Dziś postanowiłem zrobić upgrade swojego fotobloga z Wordpress 2.6.1 na 2.8. Wszystko poszło sprawnie ale okazało się, że kodowanie polskich znaków totalnie się posypało – zamiast nich kwadraciki i krzaczki.

Pomimo mocnego zaplecza, przyznam, że zabawa z kodowaniem znaków totalnie mi nie odpowiada. Miałem już kiedyś problem z ukraińską stroną znimky.net, która stała się nieczytelna po zmianie MySQL z 4.0 na 4.1. Po długich bojach problem został rozwiązany poprzez dodanie poniższych 3 linii kodu PHP po ustnawieniu połączenia z bazą danych:

mysql_query("SET character_set_results=\"utf8\"");
mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET utf8");
mysql_query("SET NAMES \"utf8\"");

Zacząłem szukać ale nie znalazłem zbyt wiele…

Dwa najciekawsze zasoby to Polski Support WordPress oraz post Polskie znaki w Wordpress na serwerze home.pl. Ten ostatni okazał się strzałem w dziesiątkę, chwila zabawy i blog znów był czytelny!

W moim przypadku rozwiązaniem było edycja pliku /wp-includes/wp-db.php. Tak jak radził Luke Szkudlarek, na końcu funkcji select($db) dodałem ustalanie kodowania połączenia z bazą danych:

mysql_query('SET NAMES latin2');

W moim przypadku musiałem użyć innego kodowania. Zmiana ustawień Wordpresa (Options -> Reading) nie była konieczna.

XML documentation comments are also important, particularly for public members/methods. Even if your project doesn’t require generating full XML documentation of the code, using Intellisense can be much more effective if it summarizes the method you are trying to use. If you want to generate XML documentation for C# in the twinkling of an eye you MUST install Roland Weigelt’s GhostDoc plugin for Visual Studio. Let me cite the author:

GhostDoc is a free add-in for Visual Studio that automatically generates XML documentation comments for C#. Either by using existing documentation inherited from base classes or implemented interfaces, or by deducing comments from name and type of e.g. methods, properties or parameters.

Once the plugin is installed and you have restared Visual Studio, go inside a method and press Ctrl + Shift + D. The XML documentation for the method appears just like that; it contain the summary, description of parameters, and information what the method returns. The only thing you have to do is to give a method a descriptive name and eventually polish what’s been generated. BTW, it works too for attributes and classes.

GhostDoc really saves your time and makes you a better developer – yet you care about the XML documentation, which is something of a higher level of understanding than your perfect code