Snowy day in London today. Here’s how our back garden looked as I was debating whether to weather the tube journey. It’s pretty, but the country’s not geared up for it. All the buses are cancelled, as are many train and tube routes.
Author: Josh
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ReSharper 4 Released
ReSharper 4 has been released by JetBrains. I blogged about it previous here so I won’t go over lots of old ground. Just as a reminder, this version supports C# 3, including LINQ. Very much recommended as a tool. If you want to try it out then there’s a 30 day free trial. Additionally they’ve started a partner scheme whereby existing licencees (including me) can introduce people to the tool by way of a 60 day trial with discounts to licence costs should those people buy a licence at the end. So get in touch if you want to give it a go.
ReSharper is a fantastic add-in to Visual Studio, and the latest revision of it is now available for download as a beta. There’s a 30 day free trial period available, and I really would encourage any C#, VB.NET or ASP.NET programmers to try it out. I could try and convince you with talk of code-time compilation warnings, super intelligent statement completion, refactoring an order of magnitude more featureful than Visual Studio, but in the end the best argument for why you’ll want to buy this product is based on how much more productive you’ll be when you use it.
This next version has the usual batch of new refactorings, but the major story is its support for C#3 and LINQ, with specific refactoring for these.
Here’s the link to the download for the beta: Link to The Most Intelligent Add-In To Visual Studio
If they’re operating the same model as for previous releases then you may well be able to download successive revisions to the tool and restart your 30 day trial each time. With version 1 of the tool I was going for a full three months without paying a thing. I did subsequently purchase it (out of Avanade’s gadget allowance) and I think it has been worth every penny. I reckon you’ll think the same.
Technorati tags: ReSharper, C# 3, Programming, Visual Studio 2008, Developer Productivity, JetBrains
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Reporting Services Sysprep Resolution
Reporting Services 2005 was installed on a virtual machine prior to a sysprep. I received errors from http://localhost/Reports and http://localhost/ReportServer that ultimately indicated that it couldn’t connect to the reporting database.
The resolution to this is to run a tool called "rsconfig". In my case, which I suspect is pretty common, the required command was:
rsconfig -c -s localhost -d ReportServer -a Windows
This led to the next issue, which was that Reporting Services was no longer able to "decrypt the symmetric key used to access sensitive or encrypted data in a report server database". I believe this is due to the fact that the public/private key of the virtual machine was changed after sysprep was run. Better practice (I’ll refrain from using ‘best practice’ here, as I’m sure there is a better process) would be to backup the symmetric key using the Reporting Services Configuration Manager before running sysprep, and then restoring it afterwards.
However, I had not backed up the key. So the solution was to use the configuration manager’s "Delete encrypted content" feature on the "Encryption Keys" page, then "Change" the key. This was fine for me to do as I had no schedules or encrypted connection strings in my Reporting Services database.
This article from the Motley Fool UK analyses property values and rates of increase in the UK, mainly using data from the Halifax and Global Property Guide. It quotes the shocking fact that an "upper end of the market" property in London costs £9,805 per square metre! This is more expensive than New York (£7,919) and Moscow (£7,720).
Link to The Cheapest And Most Expensive Places To Buy Property – 18 March 2008
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Sir Arthur C Clarke, RIP
I was very saddened to hear that Arthur C Clarke had died. I grew up with his books and enjoyed their resonance with my love of science and technology.
Here is his ‘good-bye’ message, recorded recently around his 90th birthday. I’m impressed, as ever, with his prescience, though I wish he’d been around to record another on his 100th.
Technorati Tags: Arthur C Clarke,Sci-fi
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Refreshing the Internet
I have just had a call with IceSave, with whom I have opened a new savings account. I have been consistently unable to log in and so wanted to work through the error. The nice girl on the phone confidently told me that all she needed to do was ‘refresh the internet’ for me and it would work tomorrow.
Technology’s amazing.
Update 7th Feb: Incredible. It works. Next time you’re suffering login problems, I suggest you try refreshing the internet. It worked for me.
Look at this article in The Register. It gives a perfectly plausible explanation for the alleged Iranian threats to the US navy in the Gulf. If the US were not trying to drum up public opinion against Iran, leading most probably to another conflict, then surely they would not have gone to the press with an accusation that stands on such wobbly pillars of evidence.
ProClarity Analytics Server (PAS) is a web site providing storage of OLAP ‘report’ definitions and caching of the resulting reports. The ‘reports’ are organised by a hierarchy of libraries, briefing books and views. The metadata for all of this is stored in a database.
In order to copy these libraries, books and views between servers, ProClarity/Microsoft provide a feature in a tool called PAS Administration. There is a "Migrate Repository" button that leads to a wizard where a source and target database are specified. On the last page of this wizard is a "Migrate" button to begin the work.
Typically the migration should take under a minute. However, after performing the migration many times we were finding the migration took longer and longer – up to six hours in the end!
My colleague Dan Meacham ran profiler to check what it was up to. It turns out there’s a table called SecurityTimeStamp against which it issues a "Select *…". I’m not sure what causes insertions into this table, but on the various PAS servers we checked there were between 70,000 and 1,200,000 rows in this table!
A swift "TRUNCATE TABLE SecurityTimeStamp" on the source database brings the migration time back down to a few seconds again.
We’re using version 6.2. Version 6.3 exists and may fix the issue without resorting to dodgy database hacks. Nevertheless, I hope this saves other people a bit of time.
PowerPoint prints hidden slides by default.
Tell me, why am I preparing training material? Not quite in the job description of a developer…
Technorati Tags: Microsoft PowerPoint 2007
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