Trying to blog using BlogPress for iPhone

I don't blog much, but maybe now that i have installed BlogPress this will change?
Only time will tell...

Visual Studio 2010 Performance

After 3 years running with the same system (XP 64 bit), I finally decided to move on - and install Windows 7 Pro 64bit. I had been waiting for this step in order to also move to VS2010.

So the OS is super-fresh, the hardware is a little old but still decent (quad-core, 8GB) - and this damn VS2010 gets so slow that after a while I need to restart it (3-4 times per day).

Granted - I also installed R# 5 which puts a lot of pressure on the machine. So I disabled it, but still, even scrolling a 1000-lines file is slow !!!

Searching the Internet didn't help - I only found other complaining like me.

So I started digging into the Tools ==> Options, and found out, under the "Environment" option, that VS2010 tries by default to make use of hardware acceleration wherever possible. I thought "hmm, maybe it's not as good as it thinks in using the HW acceleration?".

I disabled the acceleration and got a HUGE performance improvement!!!

Re-enabling R# comes at a cost, but at least I can work (I've enabled in R# the option to show the amount of virtual memory used, and once in a while I call GC with a right-click and it runs much faster for a while).

2 Great iPhone apps

How good is your watermelon? See: http://delafranco.com/iwatermelon/

Do you want a hot iPhone girlfriend? See: http://www.mygirlapp.com/

Disclaimer – I don't know these guys, and never actually used these apps (I don't even have an iPhone), but I found the ideas cool (even if a little .. freaky).

Finally - Compiler as a Service in C#

I've been ranting about the lack of a C# scripting tool for a long long long time. Finally, it has come by means of Mono's Compiler as a Service, now available to Windows users as well.

Thanks to my colleague Dan for pointing this out.

Apparently, the machine SID duplication problem was just a myth.

Directly from Mark Russinovich's blog: http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2009/11/03/3291024.aspx

Amazing, insn't it?

Configurable connection string with Linq to SQL

When using Linq-to-SQL with the dbml designer, by default it generates an App.config file and puts the connection string to use in it. This is fine (well, not really, but at least it works) for applications, but when working with class libraries it's a problem – DLL's don't load the app.config, so changing the connection string in the app.config won't produce any change (the application will still try to use the connection string that was used at design time).

I found a pretty neat solution here by David Klein ( http://ddkonline.blogspot.com/2008/02/set-connection-string-in-linq-dbml-file.html ), which is based on Jon Gallant's solution ( http://blogs.msdn.com/jongallant/archive/2007/11/25/linq-and-web-application-connection-strings.aspx )

P.S: The problem is known by MSFT: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386996.aspx . It doesn't seems to bother them though…

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