thinking-out-loud

Dallas BarCamp 4

We're hosting the next Dallas BarCamp at Improving.  If you're interested in joining us, come by the BarCamp web site and put your name up on the wiki. 

 

When:
Saturday, Sept 29, 2007 from 10a to 8p

Where:
Improving Enterprises - 15950 Dallas Pkwy, Suite 500, Dallas, TX 75248, USA

Who:
Technically minded cool people who like to know what's going on in the world.

Why:
Hear some great presentations by various folks in the technology world.  Also, bring your own presentation and talk about whatever interests you!

What:
Whatever you want!  It's a self-organized conference, so pick a topic to present, and share with the world.  Others will be doing the same.

SQL Blob Storage

Working with a client, I came across some stored procedures that went through gyrations to selectively store XML in a varchar field or in a text field, depending on its size.  But, after doing a little research, I came across this article on SQL blob storage with the following key points

• blobs are text, ntext, or image fields
• blobs are stored in a separate heap of 8KB pages
• blobs can be stored “in row” if the feature is turned on and the size is below the configurable limit
• blob pointers take up 16 bytes when the blob is not stored in-row

Visual Studio Regions are like icebergs.

You never know what lies beneath. Two great hotkeys in Visual Studio are [Ctrl-M-O] and [Ctrl-M-P]. The "O" one collapses your current definitions down to outlines. The "P" one expands all outlined definitions. The great thing about that is that you can quickly get a feel for

a) the properties, events, and methods of the class and b) the complexity of the class. When you use regions, you lose both capabilities.

Here is an example of collapsed definitions without regions:

 

And here is an example with some common regions:

 

 

No sir. I don't like 'em.