So Microsoft has jumped on the Cloud bandwagon. I doubt there was a single person in the room who was surprised when Ray Ozzie got up on stage and announced their new Cloud OS, Windows Azure; but I’m sure many of us were interested to see Microsoft’s take on cloud computing.

Personally I’m not convinced that The Cloud is the future. The technology might be coming together, but there are still way too many unanswered questions. For many companies, their data is one of their most important assets; so it’s surprising that the Cloud providers have yet to answer how their offering fits into the regulatory framework, and if the data is really secure. I’m sure this won’t stop some early adopters, but I certainly wouldn’t want any business critical data sat on someone else’s server. At least, not without a very clear understanding from the provider about how that data will be protected.

Another issue with Cloud computing is that it leads to the ultimate vendor lock-in. Unless you are one of the provider’s two or three biggest customers, you’re going to have no say in the features which get dropped or deprecated from each release. The potential cost of rewriting parts of your codebase to comply is mind-bending. Vendor lock-in also brings huge risks to business continuity; what happens if your Cloud provider goes bust, decides they don’t like your application any more, or that you have breached their ToS and they suspend your account? Overnight your profitable, cash flow positive business is worth nothing. Is this really something you want to leave in the hands of another company who don’t really care, on an individual basis, if they have your business or not?

The last potentially worrying question I’ll ask today is this: What sort of app works well on the Cloud? AWS seems to have attracted a few applications but most of these are just using it as an alternative to a hosting company. Are there any parts of the application you are currently working on which could be moved to the cloud successfully, and would it benefit the end user if you were to do so?

Until these questions can be answered with something more than marketing hype I sure as hell won’t be going anywhere near a Cloud.

Over the years I have installed Linux distro's many many times - the first was sometime around Red Hat 4 and it has never been a pleasant experience, that is until I came to do it this morning.

With trepidation I downloaded a copy of Ubuntu, burnt it to CD (kudos on the installation instructions - even gave me a link to a good ISO burner rather than me having to go and hunt one down) and put the CD into the drive and waited for a few hours of hell to begin.

Within a minute or two I had a Ubuntu desktop up and running through the magic of a LiveCD. This allowed me to play with my future distro but better than this there is a nice install icon on the desktop allowing me to run the Linux installer (another quite pleasant experience).

So what? Linux have eventually sorted out their installation mechanism so it isn't a total pain - what I like about this is the fact that someone has taken an existing technology (the LiveCD) and used it as part of the installer making my overall experience of installing Linux a joy rather than a pain.

(Don't worry I still have plenty of Windows machines and won't be switching my main desktop any time soon - there are just a few things I wanted to look at on Linux).

There has been plenty of response to my interview a few days ago with Simple-Talk – rather than trying to cram all of my thoughts into the size of a comment box I thought I would spend a little more time and try and respond to people more fully here.

Mike O’Neil pointed out Visual Assist X as a great Visual Studio Add in – personally I have tried it but didn’t miss it that much when my computer was rebuilt so I didn’t reinstall it – that’s not to say that its not a good tool, I hear plenty of good things about it, I think it just depends on your programming style.

Andrej Kuklin made some comments on ANTS Profiler, I disagree with him that it is “third best” – the line level timings are the killer feature for me. There were a few UI bugs introduced in v3 which have either been fixed or will be in the next round of point releases. On the memory profiling front I would agree that we don’t have it quite right yet and will be working to improve the situation over the next few months. We are currently doing quite a lot of R&D on the core engine looking at ways of improving the results collected and reducing overhead, we are also looking at the presentation of statistics from profiling and how to make these more useful for our customers. This is all still at a very early stage but watch out for more on this over the coming months. If you have any thoughts please feel free to email me/call me.

Mr Blunkett and Mr Blair then joined the discussion (I didn’t realise that Simple-Talk had such a reading among ex-government ministers) – they were discussing my analogy with Skoda’s and Porches. This comment was not really about individual development tools; rather, it was about the state of developer tools in general. We are still coding using a supped up text editor and I think there must be a better way. That is not to say I have the answer to what this better way is. Data Flow programming seems like an interesting avenue to me as do the DSL tools that are being worked on by Microsoft. Hopefully over the next few years we, as a community, can make it easier to express our program logic in ways which reduce the frequency of bugs and improve efficiency.

Finally Julian Bucknall, the CTO of Developer Express chimed in on his blog. I wanted to comment on my experience of Developer Express, their grid is one of the best around – it’s my grid of choice unless I am doing a lot of virtual stuff where by I will generally use Syncfusion’s grid (I prefer Syncfusion’s virtual data interface and DevExpress’ grid didn’t support virtual mode properly when I first started using it).

Julian then moves on to talk about support in response to a rant on channel9. Don’t get me wrong, Support is hard for third party vendors, and we all make mistakes. Having said this, I want to give DevExpress a little slap on the wrist for one thing they did which caused us a massive amount of pain with our customers. 

The relevant forum thread is here. What had happened is DevExpress had released a .NET 2.0 and a .NET 1.1 build of their components, these components had the exact same strong name. SQL Compare et al were .NET 1.1 apps at the time so when someone only had .NET 2.0 installed then our programs would run in the .NET 2.0 runtime. When  the .NET framework loaded the DevExpress libraries it would first search the GAC and if someone had .NET 2.0 DevExpress’ components installed (either through another application or because they were a developer) then our tool would crash as there were differences in behaviour between the .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 versions. Please obey strong naming conventions in future!

Even given this my personal experience is that DevExpress support is pretty good but one of the most important resources I have found are component vendors’ sample projects/applications, the best ones are ones which are clear, concise and show you how to achieve some specific goal while using the component.

I find that I end up custom painting a lot of the controls in Red Gate products, this is normally due to some gripe from our usability engineers - I was doing this today and wanted to gray scale some of the pngs when I need to show them disabled - This normally means loading up the excellent Paint.NET and grayscaling each one by hand - then I thought we can surely do this through code with GetPixel and SetPixel, my inital 0.33 of each of the color components didnt work that well and the images looked a little odd - a quick google turns up this: http://www.bobpowell.net/grayscale.htm which tells us to use a mix of 30% red, 59% green and 11% blue.

Giving us the following function: (From  http://www.bobpowell.net/grayscale.htm)

However with our alpha transparency png's this really doesnt work that well as you end up with little black borders, a quick tweak fixes this:

public static Bitmap GrayScaleImagePreserveTransparency(Bitmap source)

Bitmap bm = new Bitmap(source.Width,source.Height);

for(int y=0;y<bm.Height;y++)

for(int x=0;x<bm.Width;x++)

Color c=source.GetPixel(x,y);

int luma = (int)(c.R*0.3 + c.G*0.59+ c.B*0.11);

bm.SetPixel(x,y,Color.FromArgb(c.A, luma,luma,luma));

return bm;

After what seems like an age I am pleased to announce the release of the Backup 5.0 beta. Its a highly exciting time for all of us on the SQL Backup team and we are looking forward to seeing what you have to say about the new version of SQL Backup. From the release notes:

After an intensive research and development effort, the beta version for SQL Backup 5.0 is now ready for download. The full version of SQL Backup 5.0 is scheduled for release early in 2007. The beta offers you the chance to have your say now on how the full version will take shape. Your feedback really can influence the final product. Any feedback posted on the forum will be rewarded with Red Gate goodies!
SQL Backup 5.0 provides a revolutionary way to manage your SQL Server backups, using a patent-pending timeline based approach.

Its taken a major effort from all of us involved in the development of SQL Backup to get to this stage and its really been the first time we have had the product in a state where we can give you a preview of the future direction of backup development. Our usability engineers have done an excellent job designing the UI as have the testers keeping us developers in check.

Please let us know what you think (and get download instructions) by going to our beta forum: http://www.red-gate.com/messageboard/viewforum.php?f=57

Technorati tags: SQL Server SQL Backup Red Gate

There was an article about some research which Akamai has done on user’s experiences of online stores – mainly with respect to loading times - on Slashdot yesterday and it appeared on BBC News this morning as well.

Their headline conclusion was that if a web page took more than 4 seconds to load then a company would loose sales and users of their web sites would have a negative perception of the company.

Interestingly Red Gate did some research while developing ANTS Load to understand when people began to get frustrated with a webpage and when they would eventually abandon the website. This research lead Red Gate to develop the concept of the “frustration co-efficient” and “abandonment prediction” which were then built into the results presented by ANTS Load.

Do your web pages always load in under 4 seconds – especially under heavy load?

What percentage of your users abandons your website due to poor loading times?

Do your users get frustrated when using your website?

If you are not totally sure then I suggest you grab a trail version of ANTS Load and give it a go.

When checking for local instances of SQL Server its normally best enumerate the value of the registry key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\ and then look at the value on installed instances.

However on a 64 bit machine there are two keys, the 64 bit version and the 32 bit version for the machine so using the standard method will not work:

            public static string[] EnumLocalInstances()

            {

                  RegistryKey rk =

                  Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey(

                  @"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server");

                  return rk.GetValue("InstalledInstances") as String[];

            }

This will return just the 64 bit or the 32 bit instances depending if you are running in WOW or not.

To get both the 64 bit and 32 bit instances you need to use P/Invoke – the following code should do the job:

      internal class ServerDiscovery

      {

            [DllImport("advapi32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode, EntryPoint = "RegOpenKeyEx")]

            static extern int RegOpenKeyEx(

                        UIntPtr hKey,

                        string subKey,

                        uint options,

                        int sam,

                        out IntPtr phkResult);

            [DllImport("advapi32.dll", SetLastError = true)]

            static extern int RegQueryValueEx(

                        IntPtr hKey,

                        string lpValueName,

                        int lpReserved,

                        out uint lpType,

                        IntPtr lpData,

                        ref uint lpcbData);

            const int KEY_QUERY_VALUE = 0x1;

            const int KEY_SET_VALUE = 0x2;

            const int KEY_CREATE_SUB_KEY = 0x4;

            const int KEY_ENUMERATE_SUB_KEYS = 0x8;

            const int KEY_NOTIFY = 0x10;

            const int KEY_CREATE_LINK = 0x20;

            const int KEY_WOW64_32KEY = 0x200;

            const int KEY_WOW64_64KEY = 0x100;

            const int KEY_WOW64_RES = 0x300;

            static UIntPtr HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE = (UIntPtr)0x80000002;