Raymond Lewallen

September 2005 - Posts

• Where has Raymond been? Contemplating the pollution of the tech blogosphere.

  I've gotten a couple of emails over the last few weeks from people wanting to know if I was OK and that I am still around.  Yes, I'm still here :) First, Happy BlogDay to me.... this is my 200th post :) September has been a busy month for me.  The start of the NFL season means dedicating some time to managing several fantasy football teams, which has been fun and fruitful so far. I've also been battling, off and on, bouts of vertigo for the last 2 weeks, and the antivert makes me wanna sleep all the time, as well as leaves me incapable of concentrating for any lengthy periods of time.  I have been home for only one or two weekends in the last few months. Project FAZR takes up some time as well.  You'll hear alot about that in the coming months from the FAZR website.  We're about to start actual coding on our first project, and its going to be a fun exercise in working in a virtual development team. Lastly, and most imporantly, the blogosphere is just completely oversaturated with tech news right now.  The fun stuff to talk about is new .Net and Sql features, as well as what has come to light from the PDC.  But seriously, what can I say that you can't go read already?  I feel like blogging things that are of interest to me would only be adding to the pollution of over-blogged and repetitive information.  If you don't subscribe to many blogs, this may not be an issue for you.  If you subscribe to over 300 (including group blog feeds like asp.net, dnj, codebetter, pluralsight, thoughtworks, etc) like I do, then having to wade through repetative information becomes a real issue.  I find that reading the majority of blogs lately is just wasting my time.  We all know what is coming in VS 2005.  We all know whats coming in Sql Server 2005.  We all know about LINQ.  We all know about Vista.  Just stop already!  I've had this discussion about blog pollution and over-saturation with both Brendan and Sahil, and haven't come up with anything good yet to get me back on track. I think over all, there has been a decrease in CodeBetter blogging in general over the last two months, and I think it can be partially explained by the reasons I have just stated.  We don't want to be part of that over-saturation, mark all as read, unsuscribe issue that boring, drab and repetative blogs lead to.  We want to remain dedicated to providing you with fresh content, and new ideas and thoughts about both old and new concepts. So what is left to discuss?  Jeremy has got me thinking about blogging about design patterns.  His posts are very informative if you are not familiar with the patterns he has been discussing.  As many patterns there are, there's always room for blogging :)  Also, I've thought about going back to discussing beginner topics for OOP and .Net, which I did earlier this year.  With .Net 2.0 coming out, I think another big push from VB6 and other language applications will come after the first of the year (fiscal year for a lot of companies) to move to managed code.  We certainly don't want to leave those people behind, and need to regurgitate some classic OOP and .Net information for them. It won't take long for me to get out of this lull.  I'll be back to blogging full time shortly, once my little "blog vacation" is completely over.  Also, I'll soon be getting some formal training in 2005 products from Microsoft based on the RTM releases, and I'll share some of the less dicussed information, but stuff that some people out there will still be googling for.  All the major stuff you either already know about, or live in a bubble. Posted Sep 27 2005, 10:50 PM by Raymond Lewallen with 6 comment(s) Filed under: .Net Development, Generalities, Patterns and Practices

• C# 3.0 Chat today

  Excited about LINQ?  Excited about other things you saw or heard about C# 3.0 from the PDC?  Don’t miss the C# 3.0 chat today at 1:00 PM EST. C# 3.0 Language Enhancements Description: Can’t attend PDC but still want to talk to the C# team? This chat is your chance! Join the C# team to discuss the newly announced C# 3.0 features like extension methods, lambda expressions, type inference, anonymous types and the .NET Language Integrated Query Framework. You've been hearing rumblings about this for a while, now we finally talk in depth about the future of the C# language. Posted Sep 22 2005, 04:10 PM by Raymond Lewallen with no comments Filed under: .Net Development

• This is how my fantasy draft went

  Haven’t talked about my fantasy team because I’ve been so freaking busy lately.  Two weeks into the season, and I’m undefeated so far.  Only 1 other person in the league is undefeated.  I’m also only 15 points back from high points in the league.  Here is a rundown of my team: Starting Lineup: QB – Trent Green – 3rd round RB – Larry Johnson – 7th round RB – LaMont Jordan – Franchise WR – Terrell Owens – 2nd round WR – Randy Moss – 1st round TE – Dallas Clark – 12th round K – Ryan Longwell – 8th round DST – Patriots – 11th round Reserves Aaron Brooks Chris Brown Marshall Faulk Eddie Kennison Ashley Lelie Matt Stover I had 10th pick overall in a 10 team league, so I got 10th and 11th picks overall.  Took a different strategy this year from previous years, and took 2 WRs, and get the 2 best in the business.  No doubt, if you’ve been watching NFL the first 2 weeks, you understand that I’m pretty freaking happy about having RM and TO on my team. T. Green hasn’t panned out so far (zero TDs), but he traditionally has started slow the past couple of years. I drafted C. Brown (RB Tenn) in the 4th round.  Major bust.  Benched him in favor of L. Johnson, who is putting up monster stats right now.  Don't know what I was thinking when I drafted M Faulk in the 10th round.  I musta been just trying to get any RB I could at that point.  He was the last RB I drafted. Patriots defense has already scored a TD for me, which I expect about 1 TD for every 3 games, which is pretty good. Longwell hasn’t gotten the opportunities I thought he would.  I wanted Vinateri, as he has been on my team 3 of the past 4 years, but somebody took him the pick right before me.  Right now, Vinateri isn’t doing so hot, so that could turn out to be a good thing. I’m kinda weak at RB, but only because LJ doesn’t get many touches.  He still gets the TDs though.  L. Jordan is doing well, avg about 100 all purpose yards per game, and 1/2 TD’s per game.  Hoping that will increase as he gets more comfortable in the full time RB role. All in all, with my WRs being the core of my team, I could be on track for a monster season if my QB and RBs pick it up a little.  Even more so if the Priest goes down with an injury. Posted Sep 21 2005, 02:07 PM by Raymond Lewallen with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Fantasy Football

• Politics test

  Via Scott. Yeah, this is pretty much right where I expected to be. You are a Social Moderate (50% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (38% permissive) You are best described as a: Centrist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Posted Sep 21 2005, 01:42 PM by Raymond Lewallen with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Generalities

• Manipulating the registry using T-SQL

  Well, after a 3 week vacation from blogging, I’m back.  The past month has been very busy for me, but its time I get back on track. So I had somebody send me some code that they were having problems with.  They were trying to use T-SQL to read a value from the local registry.  When I saw that the code was about 70 lines long, I didn’t even really examine it, as there is a much easier way to get values from the registry. In the master database, there is an extended stored procedure called “xp_instance_regread” that allows you to read values from the registry.  The reason most people don’t know about it is because you won’t find any information in BOL.  If its undocumented, this means that they are unsupported by Microsoft and you have to google to figure out how to use them, or ask somebody who knows. Here is a quick example on using xp_instance_regread to get the installation path of Sql Server, and another one that tells you where the default data directory is for Sql Server. declare @returnvalue int, @path nvarchar(4000) exec @returnvalue = master.dbo.xp_instance_regread N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',N'Software\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Setup',N'SQLPath', @path output, 'no_output' print @path   go   declare @returncode int, @path nvarchar(4000) exec @returncode = master.dbo.xp_instance_regread N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',N'Software\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\MSSQLServer',N'DefaultData', @path output, 'no_output' print @path In addition to an extended stored procedure to read values from the registry, there are other xp’s that allow you to manipulate the registry as well. xp_instance_regaddmultistring xp_instance_regdeletekey xp_instance_regdeletevalue xp_instance_regenumkeys xp_instance_regenumvalues xp_instance_regremovemultistring xp_instance_regwrite As always, use these extended stored procedures with EXTREME CAUTION!  Also, anybody can use xp_instance_regread, but you have to be in the sysadmin role to change, write and delete registry values and keys. Posted Sep 12 2005, 11:56 AM by Raymond Lewallen with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Sql Development