I had been noticing that it took longer than expected to display the designer in Visual Studio for a web page or a WinForms form.

One of the guys here found an option in IE (Tools -> Options -> Advanced tab -> Under the security group -> Uncheck "Check for publisher's certificate revocation").

This made a huge difference in going from code view to designer view.

No idea why an IE setting would affect WinForms projects or designers in general.

It can be frustrating when a client calls up and reports that the system is going slow all of sudden "with no one else on the system."

After investigating the usual suspects that slow the system down, indexing issues are what can some to mind next.

Needle in a haystack I hear you say!

Well SQL Server 2005 and above very cleverly keeps track of what it considers missing indexes when detetmining query plans.

You can query the sys.dm_db_missing_index_details management view and there are others if you're interested here.

This is information is gathered for all databases since the last time the SQL Server instance was started. Querying sys.dm_db_missing_index_details will return details of missing instances for all databases in the instance your current database is in.

I have been running Windows 7 since Tech.Ed Gold Coast last year and have been quite impressed so far.

One tid bit that I learnt today was the god mode feature.

Create a directory anywhere and name it "GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}" and a special "view" is created where you can change settings etc.

What a bunch (pardon the pun) of idiots. A very popular topic of conversation is bank bashing. People love to hate the banks. Insert other big monolith as banks are temporarily forgotten. But now people can get more specific and hate Westpac. It would be funny as a comedy sketch but to come from Westpac themselves it's beyond belief.

A + B = C right?

Apes + Baboons = Chimpanzees!

Once upon a time the was an interest rate cut, which wasn't passed on in full and certainly wasn't passed on on the day of the cut. Then the storm passed and interest rates went up, on the same day as the offical rate changed and for more than the official increase.

This will be written about in markerting books of tomorrow and people will wondering how people could be so dumb!

You bankers!

Slightly off topic but it's something that has annoyed me. The Breakfast Creek Hotel in Brisbane has great steaks and an unadvertised gem in the form of steak rolls with bacon sauce and coleslaw. Ok so it's not really a promotion for healthy eating and it does take quite a few ks on the bike to burn off (because one is never enough).

Recently on my regular Friday lunchtime pilgrimage I was shocked and horrified that they had gone from $6.50 to $9.50.

They are now using better quality steak they protested when I told them that $9.50 was ridiculus.

I have started an online petition (for whatever that's going to be worth) at:

http://www.petitiononline.com/BCSR101/petition.html

If you love your steak rolls as a reasonable price, let them hear it.

I was running Windows 7 happily today when it blue screened. On restart I was presented with the following dialog to help me diagnose the problem. At least they can't make the event name any clearer. 

What's next? The Xbox informing users that they have a RROD? 

I found a post for the macro code in VS to collapse regions only (and not methods) here.

I have mapped collapse all to Ctrl-R,C and expand all to Ctrl-R,E.

I got thinking about other useful key combinations and found that in the text editor Ctrl-Q is not assigned so I did:

Ctrl-Q,A to close all documents

Ctrl-Q,W to close all but the current document.

I am forever closing all before shutting down VS (or killing the process). 

Sara Ford was a speaker at a very popular session at Tech.Ed last week about visual studio top tips.

There is an entry on her blog about the top 25 here.

I came across a very annoying problem with VS2008 and IE8 where you can't turn off script debugging.

The workaround is documented here where you download the silverlight tools for VS2008 SP1 and turn on silverlight debugging. Because the debugger can't debug javascript and silverlight at the same time, javascript debugging is effectively turned off. Interestingly, to enable silverlight debugging I had a slight variation to the steps below.

Right click on the project -> properties, go to the web tab, and check the silverlight option under debuggers.

The original steps are: 

Happy non-script debugging.

Attended Wardy's SQL talk this morning about SQL Server 2008 consolidation.

Many reason's to consolidate not least that you can save on SQL Server license fees.

A few very handy tools emerged that were suggested for use when determining if consolidation is appropriate but could also be used when investigating performance problems and tuning SQL Servers.

The first is Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit here. This tool does more than just document your SQL instances. Good option for an IT audit document.

The other tool specific to SQL Server performance tuning is SQLIO (Disk Subsystem Benchmark Tool) here.

This tool places you SQL Server under artificial load to stress the IO subsystem under configurable circumstances. You can simulate reads and writes, specify the number of threads to use, specify the io queue length, specify random or sequential writes and more.

Random writes simulate inserts and updates where as sequential writes simulate log file writes.