Channel 9 - Discussions by gallo

Coffeehouse - Why we don't have a: free, .NET, small footprint database engine?

Wolfgang Gallo — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 14:44:33 GMT

SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition. Just 1.7MB of DLLs, no installation neccessary:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=85E0C3CE-3FA1-453A-8CE9-AF6CA20946C3

I don't know if it supports > 5GB databases and if you can have several instances work on the same database file, but it may be worth a look.

Coffeehouse - ClearType on TabletPCs

Wolfgang Gallo — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 15:56:24 GMT

Actually I have a Tecra M4 as well - there's not so many TabletPCs with that display resolution out there Mine has been in repair as well - GPU went too hot Do you have the Toshiba orientation awareness utility installed on your machine or only what comes with windows?

Coffeehouse - ClearType on TabletPCs

Wolfgang Gallo — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 12:28:49 GMT

I've never been a fan of ClearType when I was using my old 15inch 1024x768 notebook. The subpixels were just too big for my taste and the positive effect of subpixel rendering got lost for me. Now I've got a new 14inch notebook with a 1400x1050 resolution. ClearType actually looks fine enough on it for me to give it a try.

The problem is that the new notebook is a TabletPC which means that as soon as I change the screens orientation, the subpixels are in the wrong order and ClearType looks bad. And it doesn't work for vertical orientations.

I don't suppose Windows XP will get an update for this problem, but how about Vista? Will the Vista ClearType be orientation aware? So far I've only tried the Office 2007 Beta 2 and the problem exists there. Is there a way to turn ClearType off in Vista and Office 2007?

Tech Off - Tiny Tennis, the game, secrets that Microsoft didn't tell you...

Wolfgang Gallo — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 08:01:47 GMT

I had to manually move the files from the ...\Visual Studio 2005\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C# folder to the ...\Visual Studio 2005\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#\Starter Kits folder to see them in Visual Studio. Anybody else got that problem?

Coffeehouse - ASP.NET or PHP 5.1.4

Wolfgang Gallo — Thu, 18 May 2006 11:01:26 GMT

When comparing PHP with ASP.NET I always think of comparing an apple with fruit salad.

PHP itself is "just" a dynamically typed language without much of libraries bundled with it. ASP.NET has all the advantages of the .NET framework like type safety and lots of libraries coming with it.

With plain PHP you have to take care of things like how to name your HTML form elements, pass then to the PHP script, register them and maybe put them back to your form elements in case some data is not valid. ASP.NET does that (and more) for you automatically.

Then of course there's Visual Studio including the free Express Edition for web develoment. Try to do graphical editing with Eclipse or the Zend Studio. Or even try refactoring with one of those. No way. Visual Studio does it all.

Of course to be fair, there are libraries and tool for PHP that do those things for you. But they are 3rd party and in my oppinion lack the integrated development experience with ASP.NET and Visual Studio.

Don't think I don't like PHP. In the contrary. I do like it very much and earn most of my money with it (small jobs besides university). Lots of things can be done very much faster and with less code and you can use notepad/pico/... without problems.

To sum up your question: ASP.NET does a lot more than PHP, not the other way round as you were thinking And its very easy to learn. Trying it out can't hurt.