October 2007 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Hmmmmmmm. If I had a pound for every time someone has asked me in the past "What's the best way to pass an array of values into a SQL Server stored procedure" then I'd have at least 4 pounds :-) I've seen people do it with strings. I've seen people do it with XML (both before and after SQL Server actually had an XML data type). And now, with SQL Server 2008 we have table valued parameters. I created a table type; create type dbo.peopleTable as table ( firstName nvarchar(100), lastName nvarchar(100) ) I created a table; create table people ( id int identity primary key , firstName nvarchar(100) not null , lastName nvarchar(100) not null ) I created a simple stored procedure; create procedure dbo.InsertPeople ( @ data dbo.peopleTable readonly ) as set nocount on insert dbo.people select * from @ data go I called it from ADO.NET on the client side; private void InitializeData() { table = new DataTable(); table.Columns.Add( "firstName" , typeof ( string )); table.Columns.Add( "lastName" , typeof ( string )); dataGridView1...

I wrote a little demo around FILESTREAM in SQL 2008 so I thought I'd share - the code's a little shabby but I got to the point where it did what I wanted and so I stopped. Some days I miss not writing production code because it's very different from demo code and the differences are where I used to enjoy spending my time. Anyway, regardless...you need this SQL script to set up the single table involved here (or at least something a bit like it); use master go -- Switching the thing on in the first place. EXEC sp_filestream_configure @enable_level = 3; -- Need a filegroup that supports it too. USE master; GO IF EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM sys.databases WHERE name = N 'PhotoDB' ) DROP DATABASE PhotoDB GO CREATE DATABASE PhotoDB ON PRIMARY ( NAME = PhotoDB_data, FILENAME = N 'D:\data\PhotoDb.mdf' , SIZE = 10MB, MAXSIZE = 50MB, FILEGROWTH = 15%), FILEGROUP PhotoDBFS CONTAINS FILESTREAM ( NAME = PhotoDB_FS, FILENAME = N 'D:\data\Photos' ) LOG ON ( NAME = 'PhotoDB_log' , FILENAME = N 'D:\data\PhotoDB_log.ldf' , SIZE = 5MB...

I spent a bunch of time today just trying to play with the FILESTREAM option on varbinary(max ) in SQL Server 2008. There's a good intro to doing this up here but it stops short of writing code against it which is where I wanted to go. So, I've created my database with a FILESTREAM filegroup, I've got a table with a FILESTREAM entry in it a la; create table Photos ( rowid uniqueidentifier rowguidcol not null primary key default (NEWID()), photo varbinary( max ) filestream ) and I've read about how I'm supposed to use PathName() as a function and then use GET_FILESTREAM_TRANSACTION_CONTEXT() as a function and then feed all that into a new API (in the SQL native client library) called OpenSqlFilestream but I look in the docs and I see that the declaration in the docs; HANDLE OpenSqlFilestream ( LPCWSTR FilestreamPath, SQL_FILESTREAM_DESIRED_ACCESS DesiredAccess, ULONG OpenOptions, LPBYTE FilestreamTransactionContext, ULONG FilestreamTransactionContextLength ); doesn't match the definition in the header file which...

Just back from the VBUG Conference where I saw a whole bunch of people incuding Dave , Oliver , Andrew , Tony , Alex , Guy , Rob , Barry and a lot more. I enjoyed it and delivered an old-favourite in the shape of a "Introduction to Workflow" session and something a little more topical in a "What's new in WCF and WF V3.5" session. For the attendees (and anyone else) the slides I used and the demo code that I used are all contained the zip file below; http://mtaulty.com/downloads/vbug08.zip The only caveat is that I built this code for me to demo things rather than for it to be easily re-used and understood so if you struggle with getting things working then I can't really help you with it I'm afraid. ( Of course - it's also subject to the general disclaimer at the bottom of the page which applies to any content taken from this site ).

I hadn't noticed this before; static void Main( string [] args) { var v = new { Prop1 = "A" , Prop2 = "B" }; v.Prop1 = "Foo" ; } Here's the error;

I found this site interesting. It's not so much for the content (which is fine) but it's more for the animation that occurs when you mouse over one of the people. Not sure how that's done but I quite like it. Unfortunately, it's done with Flash rather than Silverlight so I can't just download the source and have a look :-)

Is anyone out there building a "RESTful" (quoted as this is a very overloaded term) framework for ASP.NET ? On the "RESTful" front, there's the bits that WCF V3.5 does for you but that brings in an awful lot of framework. Then there's the work that Astoria is doing but that also brings in a whole lot of framework (i.e. all of Entity Framework underpinning your work). So...nothing wrong with either of those where they make sense but I've a feeling that it'd be cool to have a nice little lightweight extension that plugged into ASP.NET and offered me URI and VERB based dispatch into my code. Does it exist? One note - maybe saying "ASP.NET" is wrong there because one of the things about ASP.NET is that (AFAIK) it wants me to be referencing an actual, physical file which I don't think is that helpful in this space. For example, I might want a URI such as; http://mybookshop.com/books/authors/enid%20blyton (GET) whereas (I think) ASP.NET would force me to do something like; http://mybookshop.com/books.ashx/authors/enid...