...and master of none

One of the more interesting things about SQL Server 2005 is the support for the XML datatype. Instead of playing around with wierd and funky stored procedures to manipulate XML, you get validation and a bunch of other features just by specifying a field or a parameter as XML. Now, as nice as it is to be able to serialize a .net object and store the entire thing in one field in the database, I have my feelings that there is significant overhead to querying into that XML on a more than ad-hoc basis. So, you *might* want to add some additional fields to the table containing the xml. For example if you had the following XML: <OrderID>0a4fc0f8-6106-467f-ae10-45dcbfe4cefa</OrderID> <CustomerNumber>1234</CustomerNumber> <Status>Active</Status><Lines> <OrderLine ItemId="123" Quantity="2" Taxable="false" Price="12.34" DateChanged="2006-04-20T12:16:20.8942144-06:00" IsReadOnly="false"><...

No clever title for this one. Just a reminder that you can turn on tracing in an asp.net web page by including the following in your page directive: <%@ page trace="true" %> And, lest you tire of remembering which specific pages you have this enabled on, you can turn on tracing for an entire application by including the following in the web.config: <trace enabled="true" localonly="true" tracemode="SortByTime" pageoutput="true" requestlimit="10"><trace enabled="true">

I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Apple. While it wasn't my "first" computer, (that was a Commodore Pet), The Apple II was the computer where I learned about data structures, graphics, and really did some useful programming. In college when I needed to get a computer, I bought a Macintosh IIsi. While my computer programming career has been mostly Windows-centric, I still like the elegance and simplicity of products from Apple; especially when they are free. After playing with Music Match and other music programs, I've pretty much decided to use iTunes in my home as a music library management and MP3 player. I like it's playlist management features, the fact that it is easy to rip and burn physical CDs and the user interface is simple and elegant. The visualizations are cool too. I don't buy much music through the iTunes store (only one to date), but I do buy music on CD and want to be able to listen to it without physically handling the CDs; or m...