IliaJ on .NET

Have you deleted a Hyper-V snapshot, which you do not need any more? Have you really?

Deleting a snapshot in the Hyper-V Manager does not delete the corresponding differencing disk, the files are still there. The merge process starts only if you turn off the virtual machine, restart will not help. And the merging can continue pretty long, read about some practical experience example here.

I've read today the SQL Server 2008 Books Online and found the following statement in the Transact-SQL Syntax Convention:

; - Transact-SQL statement terminator. Although the semicolon is not required for most statements in this version of SQL Server, it will be required in a future version.

If you plan to use or sell your software for longer time, you should think about starting to use semicolons in your code today.

Do you really have the released version of Microsoft SQL Server 2008?

If you open the Help à About Dialog in SQL Server Management Studio, you will see the following window

What does it mean: 10.0.1600.22 ((SQL_PreRelease).080709-1414)? Is this a pre-release software? Fortunately, no.

According to Microsoft you do have the RTM version SQL Server 2008 10.0.1660.22. And the string SQL_PreRelease is merely an internal label used for the build management. So, please use the official "SQL"-way to get this information und simply run:

select @@version

in SQL Server Management Studio to see

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (RTM) - 10.0.1600.22 (Intel X86)...

Microsoft patterns & practices Team has released the first version of WCF 3.5 Security Guidelines. As J.D. Meier writes in his blog the WCF Security guidelines are organized using the following categories:

• Auditing and Logging
• Authentication
• Authorization
• Binding
• Configuration Management
• Exception Management
• Hosting
• Impersonation and Delegation
• Input/Data Validation
• Proxy Considerations
• Deployment considerations

The Ext Team has released Ext JS 2.1 and changed the licensing model. Now the choices are: GNU GPL license v3 (and sure, you must make your application open source), OEM or a commercial license. LGPL 3.0 has been removed. If you use LGPL Ext in a commercial project you should probably re-evaluate the licensing or stick to Ext 2.0.2.

Along with Visual Studio 2008 RTM Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit. The kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos, which help to learn the newest Microsoft technologies such as LINQ, C# 3.0, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX and Application Lifecycle Management. Most of these technologies are parts of .NET Framework 3.5

Recently Microsoft published .NET 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit. This kit includes information on

• ASP.NET MVC
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• ASP.NET AJAX History
• ASP.NET Silverlight controls
• ADO.NET Data Services
• ADO.NET Entity Framework.

According to Microsoft this is an intermediate release, and the full kit follows.

There is a list of .NET Dependency Injection Containers on the blog of Scott Hanselman.

Recently Microsoft released Web Deployment Projects for Visual Studio 2008, which gives developers more control over the build process and can be used in advanced scenarios. The features remain generally the same as they were in the Web Deployment Projects for Visual Studio 2005 and are described in this MSDN article. Some additional information can be found in the blog of the Visual Web Developer team.

The AJAX-enabled WCF Service template in Visual Studio 2008 creates a service class with an AspNetCompatibilityRequirements attribute. Unfortunately the MSDN description of this attribute is not as informative as it could be. The statement "ASP.NET compatibility mode allows WCF services to use ASP features such as identity impersonation" underestimates the possible impact of the attribute. Much better information sources are the MSDN description of the <serviceHostingEnvironment> element, the article "WCF Services and ASP.NET", which explain what the ASP.NET compatibility mode really does, and Wenlong Dong's blog.

In short, in this mode WCF requests are fully processed by the ASP.NET infrastructure like "native" ASP.NET requests, and WCF behaves identically to ASP.NET Web Services with regard to many ASP.NET features.

According to Microsoft, state management is commonly used as the primary reason for enabling the ASP.NET compatibility mode, though services should be designed stateless.

Json.NET looks pretty interesting and I'm going to try it. The library allows to read and write JSON with a single method call.

The downloads can be found here on Codeplex.