Mehran Nikoo's Notes

Smart Clients Post Event - Slides and Demo Source Code

As promised, I have uploaded the presentation and source code for today's Smart Client talk.

Just in case you are interested in more details (looking at smart clients from an architectural perspective), I have added few additional slides (marked as hidden) and some of them have speaker notes too. If you have got any questions in regards to those topics or generally about the talk or the related subjects, then drop me a line (via the Contact Form).

There is one additional thing that I didn't cover, and that was the way you point to SQL Server 2005 Express .MDF file. As we saw ClickOnce deploys all of the published files to a location under user's profile. When you specify the connection string to open the connection to the file, there is a magic expression that points to the current folder (where the executing assembly is located) and that is "|DataDirectory|". You need to use this as a prefix and then specify the database file name. You can see this in the code for the demo.

[Download Source Code and PowerPoint Slides - 1.77MB]

All you need to do to run the demo is to extract the solution to a folder, make sure you have access to a web server, right click on the SmartClient project and choose Publish. I am assuming that you have got Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 Express installed already.

Smart Client Talk in London Today (Wed 16 Nov)

I am talking about smart clients, ClickOnce, SQL Server Express and architectural patterns for smart clients at today's VBUG technical meeting. The event is held at Microsoft House, Great Pulteney Street, London W1F 9NB (directions) and is scheduled between 6pm and 9pm but the talk starts at 7pm.

Joining instructions

On My Wish List for Windows Crash Recovery...

is the ability to reopen the working file just before the running application crashed.

For example when you are working with a solution in Visual Studio and the IDE crashes, after sending the error report, Windows reopens Visual Studio with an empty environment. In most scenarios because the IDE didn't shut down gracefully, it doesn't find a chance to update the MRU list so you have to navigate to the solution manually. I would like the working solution to be opened again (similar to crash recovery in Office, although I am not talking about auto-save) or at least an option that allows me to do so.

I understand that individual applications can implement this feature but I assume the OS could tell which shortcut or command line argument was used to launch the application. I am not aware of such feature in Windows and I would like to see it in the upcoming releases (as long as it doesn't defer the product launch to 2008 ;) )

Microsoft is Changing...

Read Bill Gates' leaked birthday memo (via Scoble)

Cleaning Projects and Solutions in Visual Studio 2005

You may have noticed that in Visual Studio 2005, when you right-click on a project (or open the Build menu), you get two additional items: Clean and Publish. Publish activates ClickOnce deployment wizard but what does Clean do? First I thought it has something to do with deployment too, but actually what it does is to get rid of all of the project output and temporary files in 'bin' and 'obj' folders. You can also Clean all of the projects in a solution by choosing Clean in the context of a solution.

Looking for a UI for managing SQL Server 2005 Express?

SQL Server Management Studio Express - CTP November 2005

Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express (SSMSE) provides a graphical management tool for SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (SQL Server Express) instances. SSMSE can also manage relational engine instances created by any edition of SQL Server 2005. SSMSE cannot manage Analysis Services, Integration Services, SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition, Notification Services, Reporting Services, or SQL Server Agent.

Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express - Community Technical Preview November 2005 is unsupported pre-release software.

[Download]

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SQL Server Express Utility - RTM

SSEUtil.exe is a tool that lets you easily interact with SQL Server. Among other things, it allows you to:
• Connect to the main instance or user-instance of SQL Server.
• Create, attach, detach, and list databases on the server.
• Upgrade database files to match the version of the server.
• Execute SQL statements via the console (similar to SQLCMD).
• Retrieve the version of SQL Server running.
• Enable and disable trace flags (for example, to trace SQL statements sent to the server by any client application)
• List the instances of SQL Server on the local machine or on remote machines.
• Checkpoint and shrink a database
• Measure the performance of executing specific queries.
• Create and playback lists of SQL commands for the server to execute.
• Log all input and output.

[Download]