I'm an RSS addict. I love reading technical blogs, and I seriously think my thought processes and career would be on a different track if it were not for the great content I have been exposed to over the last few years of blog reading. Not only has it helped me solve technical issues, but it almost always provokes thoughts and ideas on how I can improve our product, our teamwork, and our development processes.

With that said, something scary has been happening lately; Google Reader has had very few new posts for me to read. A lot of this has to do with my addiction at home to firin...

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Sara's latest Visual Studio 2005 tip about the /nosplash option is really cool. I didn't expect it to improve startup performance as much as it did. I was amazed at how much faster Visual Studio fires up now.

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I'm not much of a "live" blogger, but I thought I would post my raw notes from the first session I attended today; Retrofitting Client/Server access, by Toni Feltman. It was a good class, and one I attended in order to learn the obstacles Visual FoxPro developers face when moving to client/server, and how Advantage can better address these concerns. It was nice to see a handful of pain points mentioned when migrating to other servers that do not exist when using Advantage.

These are my raw notes and observations:

RETROFITING CLIENT SERVER
Toni M. Feltman - F1 T...

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I will be attending Southwest Fox 2008 this week with a few colleagues. If you will also be in Mesa be sure to stop by our booth in the exhibit area and say hi. In addition to product demos and answering Advantage questions, we will also be raffling off a Magellan GPS towards the end of the conference.

There will be two Advantage-specific sessions at Southwest Fox this year. There will be a vendor session presented by one of our Systems Consultants, Chris Franz

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This is a guest post by Mark Wilkins, a Senior Software Engineer on the Advantage R&D team.

Solid State Drives
Solid solid state drives (SSDs) present a new storage option that is becoming increasingly economically viable. Our colleagues from the SQL Anywhere team had mentioned that they had done some testing with solid state drives. Our own team was having an informal brainstorming session one day, and we were speculating about how these drives will affect the performance and characteristics of Advantage Database Server. Be...

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Please take a moment to visit my base page at http://jdmullin.blogspot.com and answer the survey question in the top right portion of the page.

The question:
If the Advantage server valcode changed to be a license file (as opposed to a 5 digit valcode), but provided more self-service options and license management via the web, would you consider this a positve or negative change?

This file would be a few hundred bytes. It would be slightly harder to ma...

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Did you know you can use the keyword DEFAULT when inserting rows via SQL? This can be handy if your table has a read-only field, an autoinc for example, and you don't want to specify a field list when inserting a row. You can use this:

CREATE TABLE tester ( id autoinc, name char(20) );
INSERT INTO tester VALUES ( DEFAULT, 'whomever' );

instead of having to specify a field list like this:

CREATE TABLE tester ( id autoinc, name char(20) );
INSERT INTO tester ( name ) VALUES ( 'whomever' );

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In Delphi 2009 the new default behavior for the tool palette is to start with all categories collapsed.



I don't like that behav...

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Over the past few months I have been keeping notes as I port some components and applications to Delphi 2009, specifically for the purpose of gaining unicode support. While my project is nowhere near complete, I wanted to post some tips.

If you are considering porting to Delphi 2009 the CodeGear Developer Network has lots of great documentation describing the new unicode VCL and some unicode basics. This post is simply meant to supliment that information with issues I have encountered and is sprinkled with a few Advantage...

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I wasn't going to blog about this, but for the past few months every time I have used Delphi 2009 I have been tricked by this and it's very frustrating.

When you open the project options and head to the familiar "Directories and Conditionals" section be careful. Note it is now under the "Resource Compiler" tree item and does not have anything to do with the old directories and conditionals setting:

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We have launched a new feedback web page at http://feedback.AdvantageDatabase.com

The site allows you to submit feedback, vote on existing feedback, track the progress of your suggestions and generally provides a single interface for providing feedback to the Advantage team.

We have seeded the site with some of our choices for future features. Check out the site and vote on these features or submit your own new feature requests. If you have submitted feedback in the past but don't see it on t...

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As I promised in my original post about updating static cursors, here is a screencast demonstrating the technique(9 minute screencast).

I also made a few minor changes to the view and trigger code in the original post, as I noticed I updated the wrong table inside the trigger in the original post. :)

I'll apologize to those with smaller screens in advance fo...

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I'm in the process of evaluating help authoring software and was curious if any readers have a favorite I have not yet considered.

My core requirements are as follows:

• Imports either WinHelp or HTML Help 1.x file format
• Files are stored uncompressed as either XML or HTML
• Compiles to HTML Help 1.x, Help 2 (Visual Studio), and WebHelp
• Supports automated builds (command line compilations)

• EC Software's Help and Manual
• Innovasys HelpStudio
• MadCap Software'...

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  Posted by JD Mullin on Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:34:35 -0500
  External Blog: jdmullin.blogspot.com//
  
  

For well over 10 years I have thought that the only difference between the Delphi TDataSet.Insert method and TDataSet.Append was where the record appeared in data aware controls before it was actually posted.

For most cases that is true. In fact if you look at the Delphi documentation you will find the method descriptions are almost identical and they both include the following:

"After the new record is applied back to the database server, its physical location is database-specific. For indexed tables, the index is updated with the new record information." ...

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Ever been happy because you normalized some tables, wrote a query that was way faster than it was before, only to find out later you now have to re-architect a portion of your application? Yep, your fancy join is way faster, but that simple grid interface that used to be a live cursor is now static, and users can't just update it directly anymore.

In version 7.1 (2004) support for triggers on views was added to Advantage. I'd like to take a quick look ...

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I stumbled on something today that might be of use if you use Firefox and were not already aware of it.

I accidentally typed a Windows API name into the firefox destination edit box, instead of into my google toolbar edit box.

Normally I would expect the browser to either try to load "http://www.CreateFile.com" or to perform a web search for "CreateFile". I was surprised when I was immediately greeted with the MSDN documentation for the CreateFile API. No intermediate search and an extra click on the search results, which is my usual routine.

...

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Did you know you can execute a portion of an SQL script buffer in the ARC SQL Utility?

Many new users are not aware that you can can highlight a specific section of a script and just execute that selection.

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Warning:Marketing content below! I strive to provide mostly technical content in this blog, but this post is purely trying to let you know about a training opportunity. It's technical training, so I hope you will let this slide... :)

I can tell from my web and RSS stats that I have picked up quite a few Visual FoxPro readers. The Getting Started with Visual Foxpro and Advantage post remains one of my most popular. If you are interested in learning more...

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I don't have a Microsoft e-mail client, and every once in a while I get an e-mail with a single winmail.dat attachment.

I use a simple utility I thought some readers might find useful called WMDecode to extract the attachments. It's simple and has worked on every winmail.dat file I have used it on.

There is a free version with a timeout, or you can buy a perpetual license for 10 dollars.

...

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I mentioned in a previous post that nitpicks matter. This is the main premise of Joel Spolsky's book User Interface Design for Programmers, which while simplistic in the realm of UI design, is very fun and easy to read and significantly influenced my redesign of the Adva...

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Did you know you can "bootstrap" a debug session in ARC? You don't have to have any breakpoints set to start debugging. Simply clicking "step over" (F10) or "step in" (F11) will start a debug session and stop on the first line in the script.

This is a handy way to get ARC to quickly jump to the source code of a procedure or trigger you want to edit. For example, in this video I use this functionality to quickly jump into a procedure, edit it, and then verify my changes.

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By now all of you 9.0 users should have received your first automatic update of ARC - Advantage Data Architect v9.0.0.1. I thought I would take a few posts and discuss how we implemented our automatic updates.


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I need to post a link to the How-To Geek blog.

If you don't already subscribe I highly recommend this feed. I've learned about lots of cool utilities and shortcuts that increase my productivity every day.

The most recent post that caught my attention was this post about Jing. From the Jing website: "The concept of Jing ...

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For those of you who do not monitor the Advantage newsgroups, Chris (one of our Sales Engineers/System Consultants) announced a few weeks back he started blogging about Advantage.

I made a note at that time to post a link to his blog, but just now got around to cleaning up my inbox at home and remembering the post. Looks like he's been busy writing since then, so be sure to check it out at http://advantageevangelist.blogspot.com/

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I put together a short screencast (10 minutes) showing how Advantage can share Visual FoxPro DBF tables with Visual Studio. This provides a variety of alternatives when migrating existing applications to client/server.

In the screencast I demo a Visual FoxPro application using Advantage sharing data with a Visual Studio application using Advantage (not earth shattering news, I know). I then move on to show something I do think is worth some consideration; A Visual FoxPro appl...

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The  SQL Utility automatically highlights your SQL syntax just like many other code editors. You can customize the various highlighting options to suit your own preferences. You reach the SQL Utility options by choosing SQL->Options… (the SQL menu is visible when the SQL Utility window is open).

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There are many options for customizing the SQL Utility in ARC which can be viewed by selecting SQL->Options (the SQL menu is visible when the SQL Utility is open). In order to display line numbers you must make two changes. First select the Line numbers in gutter option under General Options. Then select Visible gutter to display the gutter in the text editor area.

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ARC 8.0 introduced two new table schema printing templates. These templates print either a simple or detailed view of the table schema. Table schema printing options are found on the Schema menu shown on the left.

The default ...

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Back in 2007 I wrote a tech-tip about Schema Templates, which was a new feature added to ARC 8. This allows developers to save the schema of a table into a file which can be loaded into the table designer when creating a new table. The schema template contains all of the information about the table including the field descriptions, constraints, default values, validation expressions and indexes. This can be very useful if you are creating sev...

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Both ARC version 8 and 9 have several options for modifying the user interface. You can change some of the elements of the user interface by selecting Tools->ARC Settings, then click on the User Interface tab.

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You can configure the default values for creating new connections in Advantage Data Architect (ARC). This makes creating connections a bit easier since you will always get the connection configuration you want. For instance, I almost always use Remote server (Local is the default) and blank passwords for my example databases. By changing the defaults I always get these settings when creating a connection to a data dictionary.

Note: You must restart ARC for the new connection settings to take effect.

You can also specify ot...

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Advantage Data Architect (ARC) has a automatic update feature included in version 9.0. ARC will automatically check for updates each time it is shut down. You can manually check for updates by selecting “Check for Updates. . .” from the H...

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Sybase has been posting several promotional videos to YouTube over the past year. This week they posted a video about Advantage done by the European Advantage Team. I thought you might like to take a look.