Applications I Use

CodeIt.Once For VS 2005 Beta Now Available!

Shandy — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 12:49:00 GMT

Having caught up yesterday on my blog reading I noticed CodeIt.Once for VS 2005 Beta 2. I have downloaded both 2003 & 2005 versions and although I can't get the 2005 version to load correctly I'm having a play around with the 2003 version. I'd hoped to have had more of a look at CodeIt.Once than I've been able to but hopefully today I can investigate it a bit more as for a relatively inexperienced .NET programmer like myself I can see it could help me out quite a bit.

Axosoft OnTime 2005 For VS.NET Beta 2 Has Been Released

Shandy — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 16:13:00 GMT

Axosoft have released a version of their OnTime 2005 Defect and Feature tracking software for VS.NET Beta 2.

SQL Delta

Shandy — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 14:37:00 GMT

I am currently having a look at an interesting product called SQL Delta. It is an application that allows comparisons to be made between SQL server databases, reporting on differences. When I have finished evaluating it I will write a review at devCity.

JetBrains Omea Reader v2 Has Been Released

Shandy — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 13:20:00 GMT

Jetbrains Omea Reader v2 was released recently and I got around to installing it today. Omea Reader is an RSS feed and news group reader and is the only application I now use to read my RSS feeds and news groups.

The download is almost 5 meg. I uninstalled my previous version of Omea Pro (EAP version) before starting the installation of Omea Reader just to be on the safe side. The installation of Omea Reader v2 was pretty seamless with one really annoying exception. I needed to reboot my system to complete the installation. I find this really irritating, especially as I had around a dozen applications open and had to waste a lot of time saving where I was at with them etc.

Once the reboot was complete Omea Reader v2 fired up, detected some corrupt indexes and asked to be restarted to correct these. I duly did this and the second time Omea Reader v2 fired up without any problems. As I had opted not delete my databases when I uninstalled my previous version of Omea Pro Omea Reader v2 located them automatically and all my RSS feeds and news group posts were available.

CodeSMART 2005 for VS.NET FixPack 4 Released

Shandy — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 23:51:00 GMT

I just received an email to inform me that fixpack 4 has been released by AxTools.

OnTime User Discussion Group

Shandy — Sat, 18 Jun 2005 07:29:00 GMT

I thought I'd mention I'd accepted an invitation to join the OnTime user group. Participation is by approval only but if you want to join in I'd suggest sending an email to the group owner, details here.

Although I joined over a month ago I've not had time to really get involved yet but I started to read through the postings for the last month this morning and will hopefully be able to join in the debates a bit over the weekend.

For those of you who are wondering exactly what OnTime is; it is a defect and feature management system.

My MSN Clock moves. Does yours ?

Shandy — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 18:04:00 GMT

Thought I'd mention this nifty little application, My MSN Clock moves. Does yours ? written by William Tay. It is an add-in for MSN Messenger that stores a personal message as your location and date/time in your current location.

Omea Reader v1.0.4 Released

Shandy — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 17:23:00 GMT

Jetbrains have released the latest version of their RSS Reader and Newsgroup Aggregator, Omea Reader v1.0.4. I've just installed it and couldn't find any information about what was new in this version. For those who don't know Omea is a free RSS Reader, Newsgroup Aggregator and Bookmark manager combined. I only use the RSS Reader and Newsgroup Aggregator facilities and have found them to be pretty good.

Red Gate SQL Backup Review

Shandy — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 19:04:00 GMT

SQL Backup provides an alternative application to create backups and restore from backups SQL Server or MSDE databases.

Installation

I received my download location and licence key via email. The download was around 5 Meg. The installation was seemless. If you want to run SQL Backup remotely you will need to enter a user id & password combination (or use Windows Authentication) for a user that has administrator password. Apparently an extended stored procedure needs to be installed.

Use

I performed my tests using MSDE 2000 running on XP Pro SP2.

The SQL Backup comes with a GUI listing the available databases in the left hand pane and a tabbed right hand pane where Activity Log, Processes & Backup History can be selected. There are toolbar and menu entries to allow you to connect to a different database, perform a backup or restore (via a friendly wizard) and set up your options. The wizards were pretty straight forward and made both backing up and restoring very easy to perform. There are choices for full, differential and transactional backups. The backup file can also be a single file, split into multiple files or mirrored so that the same file is backed up to multiple locations. You also have the choice to verify backups on completion.

Note that my backups made with SQL Backup were listed within the Enterprise Manager backup facility but when I tried to use EM to restore them I obviously got an error message. Bear this in mind so you label the SQL Backup backups differently to your EM ones.

Although SQL Backup does not come with its own scheduler it is relatively easy to utilise either the EM or Windows schedulers to schedule tasks and full details on how to do this are included in the help file. It took me less than 5 minutes to set up and execute a scheduled task.

There is a Red Gate Support Forum available to users of SQL Backup

Pros

I made a backup of my CodeLib and Ontime databases and in the case of Codelib the backup was less than half the size and in the case of OnTime around a third the size of the standard SQL Server backup.
The help file is pretty comprehensive.
Email alerts can easily be setup without relying on SQL mail which is handy if you are running MSDE as MSDE does not have this facility.
Option to encrypt backups with a password.

Cons

There was no way of specifying a default email address to send any reports to. The email address had to be retyped each time a job was created.
I used a default backup folder of d:\my documents but if I wanted to change this the dialog box truncated the folder to My and started off in the d:\ folder. Not a big issue but a minor annoyance.

Conclusion

SQL Backup provides an excellent tool for performing backups of SQL Server (or MSDE) databases. The compression ratio is extremely useful as is the speed at which the backups can be created using the GUI. I now use this as my preferred SQL Server backup tool.

Axosoft OnTime 2005 Beta 2 Now Released

Shandy — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 09:39:00 GMT

The Axosoft OnTime 2005 Beta 2 has now been released. It has some great new features and bug fixes, see the Release Notes

I seem to have been in daily contact with Dan on the support desk over the last few weeks and was tickled that I apparently had a new feature named after me - The Shandy Feature - which is the one where there are marks to indictae which tabs have data behind them :-D

My testing has so far been limited to the Windows & VS.NET versions but Hamid Shojaee (The president of Axosoft) has kindly offered to make licences available for the other products in return for my efforts so far in the Beta testing program so I intend to give them a test over the next week or so. I have downloaded all the components, just need a bit of time to install and get my head around them.

Although I had no serious problems with the Beta 1 and have been using it on my production database the Beta 2 has added some nice features and corrected a number of niggling bugs.