Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Proof read. Please.

I'm not a writer, I'm a computer guy, but I strive for my writing to be as clear as possible so it will be understood.

One of my major pet peeves is technical writing that doesn't get proof read.

In a study guide for a certification exam, the author described how to create partitions in SQL Server 2005. The code sample for the right partition was a copy / paste of the code for the left partition but neglected to change LEFT to RIGHT, so both code samples were identical. Good luck with the exam. (The book was not from MS Press.)

Another example was in a technical magazine, in a Q & A column. The reader's letter stated that he wanted to display all parent records that did not have a child record, showed the T-SQL he would use, and asked how to perform that query using LINQ. However, his sample code used EXISTS instead of NOT EXISTS which obviously would not yield the desired result. Nobody at the mag caught that, and the columnist simply replied with a LINQ example that answered the original question. If you happened to see the original question & used the reader's code sample, your results would be opposite of what you expected. Imagine that you need to send a reminder letter to all customers that have not paid their bill, but instead you send the notice to those that paid. Oops.

Sunday, November 09, 2008

February fables redux

Nine months ago I listed some predictions about MS products, let's see how I did...

SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 5; support is extended beyond April 2008. Wrong. Many shops are still using it but all support including hotfixes has evaporated.

SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3. Soon. The Community Technical Preview (CTP) is out now, which rolls up all prior patches & includes some compatibility tweaks for the 2008 Windows and SQL Server editions.

Internet Explorer 8 is released; IE 6 is still the most-used, but continues to lose ground to Firefox. Soon. The beta is out, but Google's Chrome is also in preview form.

Visual Basic 6.0 Service Pack 6; support is continued due to developer demand. Wrong. Classic VB is dead for all practical purposes, however it remains alive & vibrant in the persona of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in every Office app thru the 2007 version.

Windows XP Service Pack 3. Correct. Thank goodness they're still keeping this one alive, and even extended the timelines for OEM's to preinstall the OS.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1; still nobody wants it. Correct. It is finally being recognized as a consumer OS. The upcoming Windows 7 will probably be what Vista should have been.

And let's not forget that MS made a $44 billion offer for Yahoo. Reject. Lots of stories about this, but nothing ever became of it.