I got a nice little exam question today. It was supposed to be all about C# but that’s another story. One of the real C# questions was this. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; namespace ConsoleApplication2 { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { try { Console.WriteLine("A"); var val = int.Parse("8A"); Console.WriteLine("B"); } catch(Exception ex) { Console.WriteLine("C"); return; } finally { Console.WriteLine("D"); Console.ReadLine(); } Console.WriteLine("E"); } } } What will be the result?

If you want to learn about Google Wave then check out the book The Complete Guide to Google Wave written by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. This book’s contents are freely available to view online. Here is what is covered in the book: _Chapter 1 Meet Google Wave Find out what Google Wave is and what problems it solves. Chapter 2 Get Started with Wave Set up your Wave account and create your first wave.

Well now that we have the engine installed. We sometimes also want the GUI tools to go with it. I would recommend a reboot however. That’s what made it work for me. Let’s go to the Microsoft download page again and find the install button. Click install and then you get this, since we already installed the web platform installer in a previous post: Which will present you with this:

I remember having a hard time installing sql server express 2008 on windows XP. So today I had to install it again on win7 I looked for the download and found it on the microsoft website. I was prepared for some more pain and a long wait like I was used to. But it started by installing the web platform installer. So I downloaded that and installed it (not something that works by itself, it needs an extra click or two.

Oracle has updated the Sun Acquisition FAQ. The FAQ now has Oracle’s plans for MySQL, Java, Virtualization, NetBeans, Glassfish, OpenOffice, Open Source and other things. Below are the relevant pieces from that document. **What are Oracle’s plans for the GlassFish Enterprise (Java EE) Server after the transaction closes?** Oracle plans to continue evolving GlassFish Enterprise Server, delivering it as the open source reference implementation (RI) of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specifications, and actively supporting the large GlassFish

Thanks to our members the beta of the new design is going well. We have made some more minor tweaks and changes but overall the design appears to be going over well and we should be announcing a general changeover shortly. In the meantime I thought we would share a little more about the changes and improvements that you will soon see in the site. Screen Layout and Elements The major screen elements of the site (header, footer, sidebar) have had their size and geography modified to better fit in the new layout.

Yesterday I got a request to open some jp2 files, so that they could be renamed depending on the exif information and then saved as jpeg. Jpeg2000 was once supposed to replace jpeg because it was so much better than jpeg. Never happened and never will. But the format is out there and .Net has no native support for it. These are the formats .Net supports. Bmp Gets the bitmap (BMP) image format.

This blog post contains test cases for the first article in the series Including an Aggregated Column’s Related Values There is also an excellent (as always) article by Itzik Ben Gan Optimizing TOP N per Group Queries. I suggest to read and try the recommendations from that article first. There is a related thread on MSDN forum where different methods are also compared in speed. One more related discussion on MSDN with more performance tests.

While several of our members are studiously assisting us by using (and abusing) the beta version of the new layout, I have to admit that I am still hard at work. Well, actually, no, I’m sitting on the couch with the netbook and a beer trying to ensure the pillows don’t start floating away, but I am thinking hard. Honest. I Like Our Layout Don’t misunderstand, I do like our current design and I didn’t start this process because I was tired of the design.

The CSS SQL Server Engineers have posted an interesting post, I myself don’t have any of the fake identity columns but I did many times suggest in newsgroups to use UPDLOCK and HOLDLOCK in a transaction to guarantee that 2 inserts would not generate the same key value. This stuff below is from the CSS SQL Server Engineers post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2009/10/26/reduce-locking-and-other-needs-when-updating-data-better-performance.aspx The following pattern typically stems from an old practice used in SQL 4.