Central Ohio Day of .NET 2008 Synopsis

I rode down to the Central Day of Central Ohio Day of .NET 2008 with Rich Hamilton and Joe Kunk on Saturday.



I attended these session:

1. A Linq to Everything (Leon Gersing)


2. User Interface Design for Programmers (Chris Poteet)


3. Happy Marriage of Agile and TFS (Alexei Govorine)


4. Test Driven Development (Phil Japikse)


5. Well, Isn't that Spatial... (Jason Follas)

I had heard of recording users running an application but have never done it before. Chris's presentation had some recorded user sessions. It was interesting to watch the sessions and listen to his commentary about the design changes viewing the user interaction caused.

After the conference Jeff Blankenburg held a poker tournament back in his hotel room. It was a lot of fun to hang out with like minded individuals in a casual atmosphere. This was my favorite part of the conference.

00 Querying Named instance Linked SQL Server

This is how you query against a linked named instance of sql server.


sp_addlinkedserver 'servername\instanceName' --create the link.

select * from [servername\instanceName].databaseName.dbo.TableName --execute the query.

Search for Detroit Software Developer Community

I ran across an interesting group this morning in my search for the Detroit Software Developer Community: the detroit software engineers' grotto. The group's goal is interesting for anyone to read. They are trying to rent a space for software engineers to work instead of their office. The space will have comfortable couches, chairs, and like minded individuals. It is modeled on a Writer's Grotto founded in San Francisco.

Unfortunately for me it states Windows is a legacy operating system, Web 2.0 is dead, and Mac OS X is the wave of the future. Interesting ideas.

I'm looking to get involved in the Detroit software developer community. We have companies with lots of developers here: Compuware, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), Accenture, and Deloitte come to mind right off the top of my head.

The Great Lakes .net Users Group, but as that is in Southfield I have to battle traffic to get out there. I came from the Lansing area which has a great developer community especially for the relatively low population of the area. Being involved in the Greater Lansing User Group .net continues to positively impact my life.

This morning I went looking for the Detroit developer community. My assumption is that it must exist given the larger population and I'm just not connected. Yet :)

Clustered Index slows down BCP signiificantly

Our 19 hour job was reduced to about 30 minutes using this technique.

We had to import 110 million rows into a SQL Server table containing 5 ints during 4 import sessions. There was a clustered index over 4 of those ints.

We used the System.Data.SqlClient.SqlBulkCopy class to do the import (class mirroring the sql server bcp utility). The initial import took ~19 hours. On a new table we removed the clustered index and inserted all the rows again. This took about 12 minutes. Applying the clustered index took about 20 minutes.