Irish Microsoft Technology Conference - go there to see people

Irish Microsoft Technology Conference is taking place next week. Though it's an overview what's out there in terms of Microsoft technology and thus there are not many sessions that explains things in depth it's worth going there. I can see really great speakers there that can reveal a few secrets having a pint with you :). I'm off to Spain for two weeks thus I will miss this conference.

How the relationship between Apple and Microsoft has developed over the past 25 years

Check out this video.

How to pollute C#

You can call me a purist but from my point of view the most valuable feature of C# is its consistency and explicitness. It seems that there are 2 teams at Microsoft that work on C#. One of them introduces great features like LINQ but the second one seems to support laziness of any kind and keeps introducing features that may(will) confuse software developers. Unfortunately it looks like the 'bad' team is not going to stop its activity. Their last idea which is called partial methods and is dedicated to code generator vendors smells like a C/C++ concept. Why? Because a partial method consist of method declaration(C++ header file) and method implementation(C++ cpp file). If you don't provide an implementation then the C# compiler will remove all calls to that method from your code! This means that your C# code that sits in a.cs file doesn't correspond to the C# code compiler sends to MSIL generator. Maybe it's me but I am not mad about at least half of the features Microsoft ships with Orcas(.NET 3.5).

Roy even sings to keep us humble :)

Check out the first IT song of Roy Osherove.

Working long hours

I've just finished my 11 hours long Saturday working day. In general it's an exception that I work at a weekend but from time to time there is a need and I don't mind but nothing again comes for free. My brain is burnt and it was really hard to be innovative today which perfectly fits into the first paragraph of Roy's post. Needless to say that the rest of the post is valuable as well.
I know people that work long hours for months and they still claim they are productive. Maybe there is something wrong with me but I do believe that everyone needs to find time to recharge its batteries. And it doesn't matter whether you like/hate/love your job.

64 bits doesn't come for free

Nothing comes for free. This is obvious but I still see a lot of people thinking that 64 bits architecture is going to solve all their performance problems which is not true. Maoni is explaining this in terms of .NET.

SQL Server and lock escalation

A few weeks ago Kevin Kline gave a talk in Dublin about SQL Server performance and how to make the most of it. The talk was very interesting because Kevin touched a few times on SQL Server internals. The most surprising one was related to how SQL Server escalates locks. Kevin mentioned that if SQL Server has acquired around 4000 locks within a table then it escalates them into a table level lock. What is even more more surprising is the fact that this value is hardcoded. I've tried a few time to prevent SQL Server from escalating locks and I've always failed. Now I know why :)