http://www.atomic14.co.uk/blog Occassional murmurs from your average software developer Sat, 03 Mar 2007 12:11:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I was recently musing over the use of ASP.NET's viewstate, and had a quick truddle around the web to find something that explained the in and outs of it. I feel compelled to link to this article which I believe is one of the most throughout and better written articles ... http://www.atomic14.co.uk/blog/archives/51 I recently wrote about creating early bound COM objects in .NET, the object (no pun intended) of the exercise was to persuade Visual Studio 2005 to produce an early binable COM object without any 'jiggery pokery' after the standard build. The exercise proved successful, I could simply 'build' and start ... http://www.atomic14.co.uk/blog/archives/50 Ah databases, now I'm no DBA by any stretch of the imagination, but I've recently come across a new trend in database design which I'm pretty sure isn't ideal. When designing databases I've always taken the basic principle of using identity fields in each table and using foreign keys to 'link' ... http://www.atomic14.co.uk/blog/archives/49 Many will ask why do such a daft thing as creating COM objects in .NET? Well the answer is fairly simple, at my current place of work we only have Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and I needed to create a COM object for compatibility with an older application, which only ... http://www.atomic14.co.uk/blog/archives/47 So the Intel QX6700 is upon us, for those not in the know, it's not really a true 'quad' core processor, but a dual-dual processor. Two separate pieces of silicon (each containing an E6700 Dual core CPU) on a single physical package. But for all intensive purposes it is four ... http://www.atomic14.co.uk/blog/archives/46 Like many I'm sure, I run my PC for long periods of time, on many occassions it runs 24/7 for particulary long downloads or FTP server access when I'm away. All this time the CPU is buzzing away, doing nothing for the large part, except comsuming power and generating heat. One ... http://www.atomic14.co.uk/blog/archives/45 I recently built a new PC and was trying to decide which anti-virus software to use on it. I'd not had this decision to make for many, many years.... since 1990, when Norton Anti-Virus was introduced. I've stuck with Norton Anti-virus all that time, happily paying my subscription annually in the ... http://www.atomic14.co.uk/blog/archives/43 Back in March I wrote about SFF PC's, I've had my mind set on getting one for sometime. It's taken this long for me to purchase one, as I've never been completely at ease with the specifications available, there always seemed to be a compromise. Then, while trawling the net, I ... http://www.atomic14.co.uk/blog/archives/44 Over the past few weeks, for the first time ever, my ADSL connection at home started to play up. Nothing major, the modem would loose synchronisation momentarily (1 or 2 seconds) every few hours and then resync - Windows remained perfectly oblivious to this activity and carried on as if ... http://www.atomic14.co.uk/blog/archives/42 My last 2 jobs have involved a large amount of Visual Basic 6 development (amongst T_SQL, C and various script languages), but have been very different in terms of design and implementation of code. Prior to my current role, the VB6 code was about as cutting-edge as you can get with ... http://www.atomic14.co.uk/blog/archives/41