Archive for the ‘Microsoft’ Category

roundup

Friday, March 16th, 2007

Using SQL Server Files for Unit Testing in VS2005 TS

One of the nice features of VSTS is data-driven testing. It’s as easy as hooking up a couple of attributes to the test classes, which then allows tests to be run for multiple sets of input data. The problem is when you want to include data with the test project.

(a solution follows)


Using capistrano to manage EC2 instances (amazon.com’s “virtual computing environment”). The comments also have some interesting discussion about the considerations made in choosing to use Amazon’s services for a startup. See also: Building a Web Application with Ruby on Rails and Amazon S3.

Dare Obasanjo pondering the future of Amazon’s S3 & EC2 services:

What I suspect is that without some catalyst (e.g. the next YouTube is built on S3 + EC2)these services will not reach their full potential. This would be unfortunate because I think in much the same way we moved from everyone rolling their own software to shrinkwrapped software, we will need to move to shrinkwrapped Web platforms in the future instead of everyone running their own ad-hoc cluster of Windows or LAMP servers and solving the same problems that others have solved thousands of times already.


Passing Variables Between Packages

Monday, March 12th, 2007

I recently came across a roadblock in an SSIS project — how to pass the variables scoped in one package to a “child” package executed via an “Execute Package Task”. Like most SSIS speedbumps, the solution was easy to implement once I found the answer (at SQLIS.com) — Package Configurations.

On the menu bar: SSIS >> Package Configuration ….

From the Configuration Type dialog, select “Parent package variable” and go through the wizard to map the Parent package variable to the variable in this Child package

Parent Package Variables

roundup

Friday, March 9th, 2007

32 bit memory limitations explained at Coding Horror: Dude, Where’s My 4 Gigabytes of RAM? The takeaway: don’t buy more than 3GB of RAM if you plan on using a 32 bit OS for the next few years.


Adobe goes Agile with Photoshop

Deprecated Features in SQL Server 2005 Integration Services