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Learned a new thing about the ADO.NET DataReader (System.Data.IDataReader) class/interface today.
When you acquire a DataReader for an open connection object, then "the Connection is in use exclusively by that DataReader", says the SDK.
OK, I understand, but I would share a single connection between multiple transactions and multiple DataReaders. Maybe in ADO.NET 2.0, who knows?
If you are a Finnish speaking person and are interested in reading classical books, you might find Helsingin Sanomat's web service amusing.
The service, named "Klassikkoautomaatti 3.0", allows you to select novel style, location and time of events, style of writing etc., and then search for books that might be of interest to you based on your tastes.
I immediately found something new to read using this service, but before I start a new book, I need to finish one particular Jane Austen I have currently in progress.
I was developing test applications for ASP.NET with Delphi 8 when I noticed that the Borland Data Provider (BDP) only supports a single transaction per database connection.
This seemed a too-odd limitation for me, and I thought I was doing something wrong. Now, I did some research with a bit help from Google, and found Ramesh Theivendran's article on IBM's web site (yes!). This article explicitly notes:
"The current version of BDP doesn't support connection pooling."
Bad luck! I had to re-architect my ASP.NET application so that for each request, and new connection object is created, and then freed after the connection has been handled.
This is a quick-n-dirty solution, and I had much rather written a connection pool style of connection handling, but I'm pressed by time.
Borland, if you are listening, we need proper ADO.NET style connection pooling in the next version of BDP!
I needed to set up an Active Directory domain and route e-mail to the users using Microsoft Exchange 2003.
Now, Microsoft suggests that you name your (small) domain with the .local suffix, such as "mycompany.local".
Obviously, this is not a valid e-mail domain name, and say you have registered mycompany.com as your e-mail domain.
My initial thought was that it would be enough to add the e-mail addresses of the "mycompany.com" format to the Active Directory User's And Computers (for each user that is), but this did not work.
Instead, you need to explicitly tell Exchange to accept mail for the domain mycompany.com. To do this, edit the default recipient policy, as outlined in Microsoft's Knowledge Base article 268838.
Note that whenever Exchange asks for an SMTP domain name, you need to include the @ sign, that is, "mycompany.com" is not a valid input, but "@mycompany.com" is.
If you are creating ASP.NET web applications with Delphi 8, it is very likely that you want to have your ASP.NET pages in XHTML format instead of plain HTML.
In XHTML, you need to be much more careful how you align tags and elements, and also make sure all attributes are enclosed in quotation marks, and so on.
Now, Delphi 8's default HTML code formatter tends to create more HTML-like code than XHTML. Especially if you have a ready-made XHTML file, Delphi 8 will modify your page source so that the page isn't valid XHTML code anymore.
As you can imagine, this is very annoying! Luckily, Diamondback ("Delphi 9") is much better in this respect (verified), but still, you can configure Delphi 8 to work the way you want.
To do so, go to Delphi's options dialog box, and browse to the "HTML Tidy Options" section. Make sure you enable HTML Tidy ("Use HTML Tidy as...").
By enabling this option, you disable Delphi 8's default formatter, and you are much better with your existing XHTML code!
To further tune HTML Tidy, make sure you set the "Generated output type" setting to "XHTML".
Canon has recently improved it's digital SLR selection with the 8+ megapixel 20D model.
To me it looks like a successor to Canon 10D, which I've been looking to buy. However, early tests prove that it has been a good idea to wait.
But I would still want to have some few more pixels, like 10+. Who knows, soon?
The Finnish Tietokone magazine has published my newest article "Skriptit kuntoon Tweakomaticilla" in their issue 10/2004.
Go read this one-pager!
The annual Borland Conference 2004 is now over, and the future version of Delphi is in the minds of everybody.
Personally I enjoyed the conference once again (I believe this was my 6th conference in a row), and learned many new tips and tricks.
However, the conference itself seemed a bit downsized from last year, but probably that is to be expected given the current business climate.
Oh, don't forget to get the session materials from the secret BorCon web site, which is available at http://bdn.borland.com/borcon2004/.
You need a password to get there, but if you were attending the closing session of the conference in San Jose, you will know it.
I was visiting Amsterdam earlier this week, and had some spare time to visit a local bookstore named Waterstone's.
From there, I picked John Hedgecoe's book The New Manual of Photography. This books is from 2002, so it is pretty recent and contains information about digital cameras as well.
I've only read about 60 pages of the book, but it looks like an excellent introduction to photography.
The book is very practical in my opinion, and even though it doesn't concentrate much on each topic (only page or two), it's a good round-trip to the world of photography.
Seems like good value for 45 €, though Amazon sells it a lot cheaper.
E-mail spam is here to stay, so it seems. But, many corporations and organizations are working on ideas how to stop spam.
Microsoft's latest proposal is named "Sender ID Framework", and details about it can be found from Microsoft's web site.
The Sender ID Framework (SIF) appears to be open, but the license statement is actually more limiting.
The Apache Software Foundation has raised it's eyebrows because of this, and have written an open letter to the community.
Though I appreciate the open-source community, it should also be possible for corporations to patent ideas. But, it is mostly a matter of whether a patented solution can become an IETF standard.
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