Today I was visiting a client site doing some data mining on a third party product that they own. Ultimately we will be building reports off of their data using SQL Reporting Services. Well, as I was going through the tables, I kept seeing date fields that didn't look like a normal date field. Much to my dismay, this third party company (who uses SQL Server 2000 as a back end database) doesn't believe that the SQL DateTime field is appropriate for storing dates. No, instead they use a long integer data type and store the date as YYYYMMDD.

Not to be out-done, they did this for times too... HHMMSS, ohh, and sometimes they combined the 2 fields... YYYYMMDDHHMMSS... is that not a mess or what. So, for us to do any date comparisons for reporting services, we have to build a view and in that view convert those crappy long integer fields into proper date time fields, well except for when their not NULL!

Now that Beta 1 of Visual Studio .NET 2005 has been launched, and most developers **know its not that great** of an idea to install betas on their host machine (or main production machine), you should note 1 important thing about using VPC backup images.

Don't "save your state" when you plan on overwriting your current VPC hard drive with an older *cleaner* version. The image ends up blue screening on the next attempted boot and you have to end up copying the VPC hard drive image over again.

Just a friendly note from someone who had this happend to them

My good friend Jeff read my latest review on VisualBlogger 2004, and made a comment stating I should do this on a more professional basis. Hmm, not a bad idea. I think I may start doing this, however I promise not all of my reviews will be bad...if I find something I like, I'll make a note of it.

So, I guess I'll thrown out this statement, if you've got a utility or tool that you want reviewed, I'll be your man. Just shoot me an email, and we can discuss logistics. In the meantime (and my downtime), I'll start hunting around for those useful tools.

PayPal announced today that you can now get "Buyer Credit" through them. It's basically a online credit card that goes through them that you can use to pay for items without having any money in your account. Setup and authorization takes about 30 seconds (so they say), and you get 90 days same as cash.

Sounds pretty cool for those desparately in need of things, plus it gives users that have PayPal as their "collection agency" (I use that term loosely) an extra method to receive payment. Sweet indeedy.

WebDeploy has now reached a stable 1.1! When I started working on the next wave of things, I figured I'd only have 2 or 3 items, and it would go to 1.0.1, but as I got in and tested it more myself, I actually found a lot more bugs. This version doesn't have any breaking changes, again, but it does enhance the product to a mature level. I'm hoping this version is nearly bug free...but, what about the changelog? Ahh, here it is...

• Added the active profile name to the title of the form.
• Added column sorting to "Files able to be copied", "Folders to include", "Exceptions" and "Copied Files" dialogs.
• Changed the name of "Files to Copy" dialog to better represent the dialog's functionality.
• Changed bug submission architecture to use my tracking provider.
• Fixed loosing changes to profile when moving back & forth between steps in configuration.
• Fixed exception being thrown when a profile is deleted and no active profile is set. The "Quick Deploy Profile" becomes active.
• Fixed instance where you could deploy when no extensions have been chosen.
• Made some minor UI changes.

Nice list, right? I thought so. This utility is not for the faint of heart now, its a full fledged bad boy on the street, so watch out, otherwise it'll kick your butt when you're not looking.

"Like always, WebDeploy is freeware, and the source code is not available. If you have any further suggestions, comments, ideas, or problems, please do not hesitate to contact me or post them on this blog post.

If you wish to download WebDeploy, click here. You will need the .NET framework v1.1.4322 to run WebDeploy."

^ how redundant are these last 2 paragraphs - I don't think they've changed since 0.6 release several months ago. I guess its good to stick with what works!

So, how many days has it been since November 21, 2003 - Lets see by opening Snippit Compiler...216

But, why is that day so special? Well, I believe that was the day that I started work on my revision of my website, long time ago...yup it sure is. How do I know? Well, I forgot that the date in the top right hand corner of my website was dynamic...so its been “Friday, November 21, 2003” for quite some time...could this be a form of time travel?

What fathams me, is that I've gone to my own site for 216 days, and haven't noticed it until today...now, I must go fix it.

So after my computer mysteriously decided it wasn't going to connect to the internet anymore (got me on that one, tried everything short of throwing the computer out the window) I determined my computer was destined to its second rebuild in 1 month. Most commonly I do this every 6 months, but not  having internet can put a damper on that experience. So, even after my initial woes of SP2 not working with my DVD burner, and having it freeze on me, I decided, what the hey - I'll do a fresh install and try it out again.

Much to my dismay, things still weren't working. My DVD burner still wasn't being recognized via IEEE 1394, and now that I've installed McAfee 7.1 ontop of SP2, it crashes everytime which doesn't bode well for very secure using. So, I poked around the newsgroups for SP2, and found others having the same problems as me. Well, not as far as virus scanners, but found that people that also have the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 PCI card that has onboard IEEE 1394 suddenly stopped after SP2 upgrade. Err, so I added myself to the list - yay! of people with the same problem.

I think I'll just have to uninstall SP2, again, to get my DVD burner (and actually my IEEE 1394 devices - this includes my MiniDV camcorder) back as well as getting a virus scanner running. I sure hope Microsoft and Creative gets this issue solved before they “go-live” with SP2, because you will have many unhappy customers if things don't work as expected after an upgrade of this magnitude.

BTW - if you install McAfee prior to installing SP2, things work great...its just installing afterwards that bombs the application.

As I typed the title, I just had a flash back of ACT, SAT, CAT (I think) tests that we all knew and loved back in our early days of schooling. Standardized Testing, oh how great it was, and made it nice for the schools to accurately judge our abilities.

However, as long of a post that could be, I'm not going to be talking about testing, but rather installers...specifically Microsoft Installers. I find it quite humorous to see that each application team at Microsoft has their own Installer. No, I'm not talking about the files contained with in them, but rather the look, feel, and structure of the various installers. I find it odd that a company that has created the Microsoft Installer, doesn't even have standards for their own installers. Sure, they may all use MSI as a base, but as an end user, having different UI's for installers can just get plain confusing.

To compare on contrast, you see installers for Office products that all have the same look & feel. Its a wizard type of UI that (I feel) all installers should follow. Why? Well, its simple, easy, intuitive, and common amongst a lot of applications installers in the market. However, on the contrary, installers for VS.NET, MSDN Help, Windows Media Player, DirectX (to just name a few), all have their own “look” to them. Sure, in a sense, they all have that base “wizardry” to them, but its convoluted by the pretty graphics and interesting ways of displaying information to them. I wouldn't actually mind seeing some sort of standardization come across Microsoft's installers, but who am I to speak. I'm a lonely voice in the world where I have no say against MS standards.

Just my thoughts..I don't expect you to agree or disagree, however it would be nice to have a good conversation on this topic.