February 2006 - Posts

• Blogging from Barcelona

  I'm in Barcelona for the PASS Europe Conference . It's been a good conference once again, and we've had a great week. My MS colleagues and I put on our SQL Server Boot Camp again and came away thinking that it was our best one yet. We had sessions in Read More... Posted Saturday, February 25, 2006 1:00 PM by khen1234 | 4 Comments

• PASS Barcelona

  I'm speaking at the 2006 PASS European Conference in Barcelona. Drop by if you're attending. Hope to see you there. Read More... Posted Monday, February 13, 2006 3:06 PM by khen1234 | 1 Comments

• Answer to the most recent T-SQL challenge

  The simplest rule-compliant solution to the employee-mentor challenge I recently posted is to change the loop such that it iterates through the relationships at more than one speed. Making no other changes to clean up the code, something like this would Read More... Posted Saturday, February 11, 2006 1:06 PM by khen1234 | 11 Comments

• A Final Note on Borland

  I lamented the slow death of Borland in a recent post and was roundly assailed for it by the Borland community. I speculated that perhaps the other shoe had finally dropped at Borland with the departure of Chief Scientist Danny Thorpe, the latest in a Read More... Posted Thursday, February 09, 2006 10:51 AM by khen1234 | 11 Comments

• Review: Remote Keyboard for Windows XP Media Center Edition

  If you use a PC running Windows XP Media Center Edition as your home media hub, you’ve probably either already acquired a wireless keyboard of some type or wished you had more than once. I’ve had several and recently switched to Microsoft’s Remote Keyboard Read More... Posted Thursday, February 09, 2006 7:50 AM by khen1234 | 4 Comments

• A poor man's technique for playing DVDs on Media Center eXtenders

  Today’s entry continues the discussion of Windows XP Media Center Edition and details how to play ripped DVDs on Media Center eXtender devices. An MCX device allows you to view content from a computer running Media Center on another TV. The thought is Read More... Posted Wednesday, February 08, 2006 2:21 PM by khen1234 | 2 Comments

• I'm enjoying every sandwich

  (and my wife has started to make comments...) I'm referring, of course, to Kent Tegels' Enjoy Every Sandwich blog over on GeeksWithBlogs.net. Kent has an affable writing style that I look forward to when I see something come across the wire. He's got Read More... Posted Tuesday, February 07, 2006 1:15 PM by khen1234 | 6 Comments

• Poll: What are your biggest security concerns for SQL Server 2005?

  I'm interested to hear what you consider the biggest potential security issues with SQL Server 2005. I've asked previously about concerns regarding SQLCLR ; today I'm widening the net and asking about the entire product. If you have security concerns Read More... Posted Tuesday, February 07, 2006 10:28 AM by khen1234 | 20 Comments

• Review: Napster for MCE

  If, like me, you use a PC running Windows XP Media Center Edition as your home media hub, you’ve probably ventured into online music services a time or two or at least wanted to. Today, I’ll talk about my experiences using one of these, Napster’s plug-in Read More... Posted Monday, February 06, 2006 10:38 AM by khen1234 | 0 Comments

• TSQL coding challenge

  Today’s entry is another T-SQL puzzle. Steve Kass took the prize for the best solution to my last T-SQL puzzle , and several others came up with some pretty original solutions of their own. I especially liked the ones that were T-SQL specific – ones that Read More... Posted Friday, February 03, 2006 2:59 PM by khen1234 | 61 Comments

• Sleeping vs. Yielding

  According to the BOL, the recommended way of yielding to other workers in SQLCLR is to call System.Thread.Sleep(0). Long before Yukon shipped, I had a conversation with a coworker who was responsible for knowing something about SQLCLR, and I asked how Read More... Posted Thursday, February 02, 2006 5:24 PM by khen1234 | 9 Comments

• Subtle bugs

  Saw some code like this the other day. See if you can tell what’s wrong with it: BOOL bRes=SomeApiThatReturnsBOOL(); if (TRUE==bRes) { SuccessHandler(); } else { FailureHandler(); } The problem is that the API function in question returned 1 when successful, Read More... Posted Wednesday, February 01, 2006 8:47 AM by khen1234 | 5 Comments