Victor Stodell

I am back home in the couch filled with enthusiasm from the last gathering of LEAP Sweden before the trip to Redmond in the end of May. Todays topic was the new versions of Windows (server and client) as well as the Business Intelligence product suite from Microsoft. The Business Intelligence suite basically is a really nice integration between products that already exist. With SQL Server 2012 , SharePoint 2010 and Excel 2010 tightly integrated Microsoft offers a really attractive package. Mikael Nyström showed off some of the new features in Windows Server 2012 . To say the least this is an impressive release. There is a heavy focus on virtualization, storage and terminal services which makes Microsoft a strong competitor against both VMWare and Citrix in the small to medium sized business segment. One of the coolest features has to be conditional permissions. Johan Lindfors gave a demo on Windows 8 development . He showed some samples of how easy it is to develop Met...

We have had issues when synchronizing date and time in some handheld Windows CE devices. Time always seem to get an hour wrong and we have already confirmed that it has to do with Daylight Savings Time. But we have not figured out what and why until just recently. In some cases we have used the SQL method  GETDATE() , in other cases  DateTime.Now() . The case where the latter is used there are never any issues, but with  GETDATE() we get the one hour difference most of the time. This is simply caused by the settings and configuration in the handheld device and SQL Server Compact. A proper solution would be always to use  UTC -date in the application and the database to get rid of such problems. But since that would be a major change we decided to just go with using DateTime.Now()  instead of GETDATE() .

This week has been lined with clumsiness, weird problems and some pride. The latter because I actually managed to conquer the problems. The clumsiness was just me managing to shut myself out from my computer. All accounts except the domain accounts were disabled, the domain cache was disabled and network settings not allowing contact with the domain. That is not a good combination. Thanks to  Offline NT Password & Registry Editor  I got in again just fine. The reason this all happened was mainly a security aspect, but combined with the poor network settings it turned out to be way too secure. The weird problems had to with our Windows CE application. As usual the information supplied from the users is very limited, like  "it doesn't work" . But when I finally got my hands on the log files I got even more confused. Weird problems in the shape of  SqlCeExceptions , no GPRS connection, sudden torn-offs... It turned out to be a memory card that was loose. The dat...