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PropertyBag - December 2006
Well, this is the last PropertyBag of 2006 and so we have a great one lined up for you. Rather than just sending this to VBUG Members only this edition is being broadcasted to all our developer contacts, I hope you enjoy! This edition is a real Geek-out edition as we are talking hardware and software in this edition. So, lets get cracking….
Does 64-Bit make the difference you would expect? This one really does interest me, as for those of you out there who remember there was a big event when we moved from 8-bit to 16-Bit, but when we moved from 16-Bit to 32-Bit the world really rocked. I was somewhat surprised at the results, yet considering the price performance of these processors it is quite amazing the processing power that you can get for a couple of hundred quid today. Check out this whitepaper by clicking here. Frameworks. We all know and love our .net Framework, which recently notched up version 3.0. Yet, there are a number of vendors out there who offer frameworks to sit on top of the .net framework. Why would you want this? Well one really great reason for this is do you remember when you first looked at .net how overwhelming it seemed, so many classes, interfaces and methods. Where do you start? But you had to start somewhere. Well, the .net framework is like being given all the resources to build a house, bricks, timber, mortar etc, but really where do you start. Today, frameworks from mere mortals, PDSA and CSLA.net to name but a few are providing capabilities to reduce your coding time with their frameworks. Yet, you still have the learning curve, which can sometimes be as steep as learning .net over again. Yet if you follow their architecture, your applications can be slicker, easy to maintain and might even perform better because these frameworks have already been around the block and probably already have that class or interface you need. These frameworks vary in price too, from the price of a book for CSLA.net(www.lhotka.net), to £400 for mere mortals.net (www.oakleafsd.com) to a few thousand for Paul Sherrifs .NET productivity framework (www.pdsa.com). I spent some time evaluating which one would work best for me. After all, I decided I had written enough data access code for a lifetime, yet these frameworks all seem to want to offer data-binding and I personally just don’t think it cuts the ‘speed-mustard’ enough when compared to stored procedures. So, if you want to get a jump start on this stuff, and maybe even get that next project done in 60% of the time, take a look at the products mentioned above. Vista Rolls (it rocks too if you have the right hardware!!!) So, after many delays Microsoft finally pushed Vista out the door. Having worked through a number of beta’s and CTP’s its nice to see the final product. Yet as always Microsoft are damned no matter what they do. If they delay they are wrong, if they don’t delay and there are bugs in the release, then they are wrong. Sometimes, you just got to feel for the guys a bit. Well, maybe. Vista isn’t all sweetness and light, as if your graphics card is over about 2 years old, it may not support DirectX 9 which means you won’t get that swell looking Aero interface. There is also some issue with that End User Licence Agreement that The Register (www.theregister.co.uk) brought to our attention here. Ok, so the register can sometimes be a bit Daily Mail, but I must admit I am a little concerned that parts of my OS might be switched off. Something to think about if you are building new system to really consider 64-Bit hardware as the drivers for 64-Bit vista have to be signed by the manufacturer. The upshot of this is that it makes the whole platform more secure as virus writers and those who would do bad things are not going to sign their code. Book of the Quarter So, this for me has been great and valuable read this quarter so I am giving the award to Visual Studio Tools for Office by the 2 Erics. Having been working on a .net project that ended up involving a large amount of Excel work, this book really did come to my rescue as all does not translate from VB6 to .net exactly as one would think. Addison Wesley 0321-411757. Book of the Year 2006. Those of you who know me, will know of my passion for SQL Server and in particular 2005. Well, one of my SQL Server heroes is Bill Vaughn. Bill has revised his hitchhiker guide series and produced a seventh edition. This book is just as entertaining a read as the previous editions and has some fabulous additional online content. If you do SQL server then get this book, it’s a great reason to get away from the relatives over the festive period ISBN 0-321-24362-5. Red-Gate Staying with SQL Server for just another moment. Those fine chaps over at Red-Gate have released some cracking products for those of us who spend more time than we should with a certain enterprise database. Now they have a really great refactoring tool which should be all meaningful for those of you who have the .net refactoring tool. So, get yourself over to www.red-gate.co.uk and check out their tools and the blog. One final thing add this one to your favourites www.simple-talk.co.uk is a kind of development news portal that is run by red-gate and it has some great articles on both SQL Server and .net. Great Hardware Having had an Athlon XP system serve me faultlessly for over 3 years. One morning I heard the message ‘system has failed CPU test’ had me concerned that my workstation was going to disappear in a cloud of smoke sometime soon. So, I decided it was time for some new technology. I am a die-hard AMD fan, well not a fan actually, I just like their processors and I made the decision that I was going to build a machine for the next 3 years so I had to have Vista in mind. I have built my own machines for many years now and I decided that a dual-core was going to be my destiny. One thing I have noticed over the years is that if you exclude graphics cards, any hardware that is good for games, is great for development. I say exclude graphics hardware simply because you don’t need 32 pipelines and multi-terapixel shaders for running VS2005. So, I was going to have a nice graphics card, but nothing that was out of the ordinary. I settled for a 7900 GT, which enabled me to spend more on the other hardware. What I will say is that Western Digital make some fabulous hard drives these days. I like speed from a hard drive, but not when capacity is at stake. So, I wasn’t going to buy raptors, instead I bought 3 WD 500GB drives and moved over 4 drives from my older system. After the first week of use, 2 of my original drives began to show signs of disgruntlement and I could write to them, but not read back reliably. These Maxtor drives were almost 5 years old so they don’t owe me much either do they have been designated to become doorstops. My final build is a real beast. Athlon X2 FX processor, with 8GB RAM (yep pointless from XP but Vista really rocks.) Western Digital Hard drives all using SATA interfaces. This machine really cooks through a compile that took over 10 minutes on my old machine in less than 1 minute, so dual core is where it’s at. So, that’s about it for 2006 I guess. As always if you got comments, gripes or just want to air a view email me at geoff.hirst@vbug.co.uk. Other than that have a great Christmas and catch you in 2007.
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