The other day, I had an email exchange about the virtues of virtualization, of which I am a huge fan. He asked about performance and our plan to upgrade all of our developer laptops to 2GB of RAM. My response was that was a good start, but I felt that 4GB was going to be needed in the not so distant future.

His reply: "You're my own personal version of Moore's Law..."

I've been working with dynamically adding controls and server controls for three or four years now, but I've never really thought about how the page life cycle works for controls that are dynamically added - even though that's pretty much how my custom controls are built.

Well, Michal Talaga sheds some light for those who are interested. It's referred to as "Catch-Up Events" and basically the controls go through a hyper life cycle to catch up with the stage that the rest of the page is in. Definitely good to know!

Technorati Tags: ASP.NET | Page Life Cycle

I just got confirmation that I'll be at MIX07 at the end of April. If you're going to be there too, let me know, and maybe we can meet up for a drink or something.

It should be a good time, and I'm looking forward to it. The last major conference I went to, I met a lot of people that I knew virtually, and it was defintely nice to meet others in person.

Technorati Tags: MIX07

Scott Hanselman has a great post about virtualization, and one of his recommendations is to enable hardware virtualization. Well, when Scott speaks, I listen! I saw the new option when I installed Virtual PC 2007, but it wasn't checked, nor could I check it since it was grayed out. I figured my hardware didn't support it - that it was planned for hardware that wasn't quite out yet, and I didn't do any research beyond that.

But sure enough, right in the bios of my D820 was an option to enable it, which I did. I haven't done any major development inside VPC yet, but my initial thoughts are that it definitely seems to boot faster and seems snappier. Compiling seems faster too, but the real test will be tomorrow, when I do some "real" work!

Even if the gain isn't huge, it's still worth enabling if you do any real work inside VPC like I do.

Technorati Tags: Virualization | Virtual PC

I was having a conversation with a co-worker the other day about what podcasts I listen to, and we got talking about some of the best technical podcasts out there. Shortly after that, I found a nice short list from Sean Deasy?which just about sums it up.

And for the record, yes, I listen to every one of them.

Technorati Tags: Podcasts

DavidM from SqlTeam.com reveals a nice little script that you can run against your database to give you a quick measure of your database's health - at least from a schema perspective. It's basically the ratio of constraints to fields in a table - and the overall ratio is an average of each table. It's obviously not an absolute measure, but it's a good starting point.

I ran this against my current project's database, and I was pleasantly surprised to see an average of .59 on a database with 50+ tables - especially considering that none of us doing the database design are DBAs and we don't have many check constraints since we do most of that in the application.

I ran this against a few of the Tourney Logic databases, and the score lower - but I also noticed that the ASPNET membership tables score kind of low, so I'm going to blame it on that!

I found this to be a great quote from Seth Godin:

"It's not about criticism or the avoidance thereof. It's a thirst for insight, for shortcuts and for results"

He's talking about business people, but it definitely applies to developers too.

I got the oddest spam message this morning - the body made no sense, and had no real message in it - it appears to be just random text, and my guess is that it's being sent out just to wear down the spam filters and see what can get by them.

But that's not what stuck out about the message: it was the subject. "Tim Huckaby is a Microsoft Regional Director and a respected international speaker." This was to our Tourney Logic support account, so it's not an email that gets registered on "geek sites" - if it came to my personal email address, that would be a little more understandable, but this account is a pretty generic one.

By the way, I've met Tim a couple of times and he is a great speaker, but I didn't know he was popular enough to be spam fodder!

I've been using the release candidate of VPC 2007 for a couple of months now, so I was glad to see that it hit RTW today - not because I've had issues, but because it's always good to have one less beta product running on my box!

I ran VPC 2007 RC under both Windows XP and Windows Vista, and it's stable on both. The best part is that it's free, so there's no excuse not to give virtualization a try. For me, it's revolutionalized how I develop - I'm able to isolate client environments and try out new software without destablizing my box, which is very important to me.

Technorati Tags: Virtual+PC | Virtualization

As is our custom, we're running our third annual Tourney Logic Match Play Pool Contest, and we're giving away a $25 Best Buy gift certificate to the winner.

Usually, we use this as a beta test for the coming March Madness rush, but this year, things are different. We've been running pools for The Tennis Channel for a few months now, so we're pretty much set on features we're going to add, as well as being pretty confident that we have the serious issues taken care of. This year, it's all about running the tournament and less about issues we might see, so I'm looking forward to it this year!

So, go ahead and head over there and submit your picks and see how it goes. The window closes on Wednesday morning, and of course, let me know what you think!

Technorati Tags: WCG | Golf | Tourneytopia | Contest | Best+Buy