I discovered that there was a new, free, version of MSDE called MS SQL Server 2005 Express. This next generation version of MSDE supports .Net 2.0 and XQuery. I downloaded and installed .Net 2.0 beta and Express beta -- only to find that the whiz-bang client tools do not exist yet. I will await those tools before continuing with my evaluation.
... until the collector arrives ...
2004-06-29
2004-06-25
Intranet
I migrated our Intranet web site files from VSS to SVN. I wanted to make the 'live' web directory an SVN working copy, but I didn't know how to configure IIS to not serve up the numerous .SVN files. I was looking for an equivalent to the Apache 'limit' directives. Apparently, there is no such concept on IIS. However, Microsoft has a global ISAPI filter called UrlScan which can, among other things, be used to control whether files are served up based upon their extension. UrlScan is configured by the file:
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\urlscan\urlscan.ini
The default UrlScan permissions are fairly tight. In order to avoid breaking any other applications (like ASP.NET or FrontPage extensions), I moved the UrlScan filter down the list in priority (on web site properties\ISAPI filters page). Note that UrlScan loads as a 'high priority' filter unless you adjust the setting of the AllowLateScanning directive in urlscan.ini).
2004-06-24
Subclipse
I installed the subclipse Eclipse plug-in for Subversion. There were a some gotchas:
- The zip file contained what looked to be a standard Eclipse plug-in directory structure but, in fact, the real plug-ins were nested more deeply in the structure. In addition, there were some DLLs to throw in the main Eclipse directory.
- Make sure that you exclude .svn directories from the build copying process (by adding '.svn' to the list of filtered resources on the Preferences/Java/Compiler/Build Path panel). If you don't, subclipse thinks that all of the build product directories are under source control and gets very confused. Also, you cannot rebuild the project as Eclipse will fail to delete all of the read-only files in the .svn directories. You must delete the directories manually.