I’ve found yet another amazing little tool in Ubuntu. BloGTK is a weblogging client for the Linux platform. It was incredibly quick to setup and its very easy to use.
Yet another reason to install Ubuntu 
So last night I installed Ubuntu. Here are a few things that impressed me so much.
1) I could surf the net and listen to music from my windows partition while it was installing (BIG PLUS)
2) Once it had installed, I set up my graphic drivers in under 20min (19minutes download time for the drivers). I used an app called Envy to update my ATI X1600 drivers
3) I could use my “local only” bandwidth to update Ubuntu’s packages and from Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10
4) When I wanted to watch an XVID file, it asked me if I wanted to search for codecs and within 30s those codecs had been found and installed and the video was playing
5) During installation, Ubuntu detected my Windows partition, my account on windows and copied all of the “My Documents” folder over to my Linux partition
6) It ever retrieve and set my background image from windows into Ubuntu
7) I had Beryl installed in less than 10minutes using the Add/Remove Programs function. 
When I opened FireFox, all of my Favourites from Flock on my windows partition has been copied over.
9) When I hit the print Screen Key, A dialog appeared and prompted me for the location to save the image to and which file format I wanted.
10) within 15 minutes my ipod had synced with RhythmBox (The Linux verison of iTunes it seems)
So there we go. Seriously consider Ubuntu. I will be installing VMware tonight so that I can install windows into that for development purposes.
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So after one too many problems with Windows I have decided its time to put windows where it can’t hurt me anymore. In a virtual Machine. What do I use windows for anyway? I only use it for development. So I’ve decided to return to Linux. Now its been years since I installed Linux in any form and stuck with it. I’ve heard so much about Ubuntu over the last while that I decided to give it a try.
All I’m gonna say is “WOW”. There’s no other way to describe this. I will go into more detail soon, probably over the weekend. Seriously look into this if you’re sick of windows.
Just an update as to why my blog has been quiet. I am currently preparing for a 2 man play that I’m involved with. Our opening show is on Friday night so we’ve been practicing a lot so there hasn’t been a lot of time for anything else.
On top of that my PC has been giving me trouble so I’m currently downloading Ubuntu 7.10 and will replace windows almost completely by the weekend. I will install windows into WMware for development purposes. From what I’ve seen it looks like a solid Linux distro. I will let you know how it goes.
Anyone interested in coming to watch the play, it will be happening in Springs this weekend. Drop a comment on this post if you would like details on when / where.
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Armand is organising a Facebook Developer Garage in Joburg soon. Join the Facebook group here! http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18118751136&ref=mf
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It is a sad state of affairs when a company cancels a probably sold-out concert because of politics. I am a HUGE Metal / Heavy Metal fan and my number 1 album of this year is definitely “The Blackening” by MachineHead. It is lyrically and musically an extremely powerful album. I would kill to have these guys performing out here in South Africa one day, yet Disney in Orlando canceled their show 2 days before its due date. 2 DAYS! I mean WTF?! The tickets had been on sale for 2 weeks and Disney pulled this off.
Robb Flynn (lead singer of MachineHead) wrote a blog post here concerning this and it has the whole story : http://headbangersblog.mtv.com/2007/10/10/guest-blog-machine-heads-robb-flynn-talks-censorship/
Whats sad, as Mr. Flynn points out, is that the show got canceled to make Disney Land a “safer place” while the cinemas there are showing adult only movies containing Sex, Nudity, Excessive Violence and extreme Language. None of the Hip-Hop shows had been canceled either. What is wrong when in “The Land of the Free” you can’t even enact your human right to freedom of speech?! Its ridiculous.
Come to South Africa MachineHead, we wont ostracize you! Ask Metallica when they were welcomed by a 43, 000 strong crowd in Centurion. BRING ON THE METAL! \m/
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Tags: MachineHead, Robb Flynn, Heavy Metal, Metal, South Africa
As some of you know, I am an incredibly “lazy developer”. By that I mean, if there’s a quicker and safer way to do something I’m there!
I recently downloaded RedGate’s SQL Prompt trial version. It was 2 weeks of heaven on earth when it came to writing queries. Unfortunately my company won’t be purchasing it due to budget constraints but I’m hoping to purchase a personal version by the end of the year.
For those of you that don’t know what SQL Prompt is, it is basically intellisense for your SQL Query Analyzer. Not only does it contain snippets to perform various functions, such as insert for tables, but it also remembers joins that you make between tables! Relationships that are set in the database are automatically detected when you decide to join the table it suggests the join and you simply need to hit TAB to enter that code.
RedGate’s SQL Prompt is simply amazing! Download the trial here and give it a try: http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Prompt/index.htm
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Since starting my journey into seeing what LiNQ can do I have been amazed. It is truly amazing and this will definitely shorten development time on so many different projects! Here’s what I did tonight and you decide for yourself whether LiNQ is going to be useful or not.
I first created my database tables and set the relationship between the tables. Once you have done this, from your database server tab in Visual Studio, you simply drag and drop both tables into the LiNQ to SQL designer in Visual studio. This is what it looked like :
Once I had saved the dbml file I made a very simple ASP.Net Page for my Task Entry. I included a RadionButtonList to list all of the users in the database. Unfortunately you cannot bind directly to a linq table but I believe this is for security purposes. Once I can find the reason I will definitely post it because personally I feel one should be allowed to bind directly to a linq table. Once the page had been completed it looks like this:
Now as I previously stated, you cannot bind directly onto the linq table so you have to retrieve all the users and loop through them and add them individually to the RadioButtonList. Here is how I did it. This is by no means the perfect way of doing it but if you do know of a better way please let me know! This is the only way we learn is by learning from eachother!
TaskDataContext is the name that I gave to my LiNQ to SQL dbml class. You have to declare this to do any work on the database. This is basically your connection to your Database. Once we have our connection we want to retrieve all our users. I have declared a variable called _UserList to hold the list of users. The “var” keyword is new to Framework 3. The “var” keyword represents the “Implicitly Typed Local Variables” feature. The way this works is that when you declare the variable you don’t need to specify the type *BUT* the variable *MUST* be initialized on declaration. The compiler will interpret the value and assign its data type accordingly.
Once the information is retrieved from the database that _UserList variable is assigned to a List<USER> variable containing a generic collection of USER classes. I think the rest of the code is self explanatory. I loop through the collection creating a new list item for each USER in the _UserList collection and add those items to the RadioButtonList.
Now comes the magic. Adding the Task to the database. This is the part of LiNQ that has absolutely amazed me thus far. We write the code for the “Add Task” button:
This is it! No SQL code typed whatsoever! No Insert SPROC needed. No Inline SQL needed, nothing! We simply declare our TasksDataContext and then declare a new task. We set the properties needed by the class and add the new TASK class to our TaskContext and then call the SubmitChanges() Method. Lets have a look whats in the database shall we?
And there we go. And I’ll say it again, NO SQL CODE NEEDED FOR THE INSERT!!!!! I realize this makes me seem incredibly lazy which I am. Please feel free to correct anything I might’ve done wrong in your opinion or something I could’ve done better.
Next Article will cover Updating and Deleting using LiNQ.
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