Software guru, Inc

In the 90's disk compression software was all the rage, starting with Stacker and then with DoubleSpace from Microsoft.  The idea was to create a compressed file of an entire disk, and then load the compressed disk and present it as a normal uncompressed disk.

For a long list of reasons no one does this anymore.  However, what if you have an old disk, floppy, Zip Cartridge etc that has a Stacker volume on it.  How do you get your old data?  it's as easy as 1, 2, 7....

Embarcadero's new RAD Studio XE5 introduces unified, single source cross platform Development for Win32, Win64, Mac OS X, iOS and Android.  This is currently the best way to write cross platform applications over all these platforms.  Certainly Mono, can work to hit most of them; but deployment of such apps along with their performance is extremely complicated.  RAD Studio provides native level code on all of these platforms.  At some point, I hope to post more on this in detail.

In addition, they've implemented a new REST Client API supporting the REST Protocol and Open Authentication 1.0/1.1 and Open Authentication 2.0 this allows easy connection to most of the modern web API's.

Unfortunately there is a bug in the OAuth1 client that causes OAuth1 authentication to fail in the western hemisphere for Twitter, Tumblr and other 1.1 API's I've tried.

Increase developer efficiency, shorten project times and create more stable applications by using third party controls.

SQL Server is a great product that many clients begin using when they want to automate a lot of work previously done in Excel and Access.   People are amazed at the ease and speed at which SQL handles incredible volumes of data that would bring Excel to its knees.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of Excel functions for which there are no equivalent functions in Transact-SQL, and which are very hard to write in t-SQL.  The answer, of course, is write them in SQL CLR, a .Net assembly callable from SQL Server as an extended stored procedure.  But who has time to write Accrual and BondInt functions, or string functions?  The people at WestClinTech do.  

MSMQ, Microsoft Message Queuing has been around since the days of NT 4.0 and Windows 95, way back to 1997.  Initially it was an add on product to windows, but starting with Windows 2000 it was included in the server versions of Windows and with Windows XP it was included in the desktop operating system.  It’s a Windows Feature that you can install/enable via the Windows Components part of Add/Remove Programs (or Add Features in W2K8).  Yet surprisingly few application developers know about it or how to use it to improve application performance.  Tonight we start with an introduction, later posts will talk about improving desktop application performance (everyone who blogs about MSMQ talks about server uses of MSMQ)

While the "art" of being a DBA is something that's often very application specific there are some universal optimizations that can be done to almost any SQL Server.   While tailored to MS SQL Server, these optimizations are generally valid for most RDBMS.

The Areca RAID controllers are great SATA RAID controllers that I have great success with.  Unfortunately, recovering a damaged array can be a bit, shall we say, unorthodox.

Simple routine to write to the event log in any version of Delphi (need to see about working on my code formatting in  the blog though)

How to increase the maximum number of simultaneous downloads from a given site in Internet Explorer

How to enable MS Office scripting in a Terminal Server/Remote Desktop Services environment.