Richard Mitchell

Been a bit busy lately

Richard Mitchell — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:36:00 GMT

What I learned lately - by Richard Mitchell Aged 32 3/4.1. When you're managing a large project team don't expect to get 4 days coding done a week.2. Designing a UI that people can use is much harder than it seems.3. Hire the right people and they'll work wonders.4. I can't pronounce Hungarian names.5. Or French ones.6. And I get English ones wrong (Clive is pronounced Colin in my head)7. Foam dart guns are fun.8. Splitting work into components allows multiple developers to just get on with it.9....(read more)

Serialization - that annoying little problem

Richard Mitchell — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:04:00 GMT

As I've been doing a bit of work on remoting (see my previous blog post) I'm necessarily looking quite a bit into the serialization of messages. Yesterday I found quite a good article on the CodeProject website with a good set of references about remoting it's well worth a read. While I'm on the subject I thought I'd share my variation of Ingo Rammer's RemotingHelper class. This is a class that enables you to create remote classes based on interfaces via the remoting configuration file. Normally...(read more)

Remoting and common classes

Richard Mitchell — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:42:00 GMT

I've been playing a bit lately with .NET Remoting and I must say that so far I'm deeply un-impressed. The documentation seems to be sparse at best and downright misleading at worst. So I thought I'd put a few of my discoveries here so that people can learn from my mistakes. .NET Remoting is a technology that allows the .NET runtime to code in another AppDomain or even another remote machine without having to worry about the details. At least that's the theory. The problem is when you want to make...(read more)

SQL Data Compare 6.1 - row level restore comes of age

Richard Mitchell — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:22:00 GMT

It took a little longer than expected but "By George I Think We've Cracked It!". Towards the end of last year a bunch of us went out to go ice skating and otherwise spending the company's money - which was nice, earlier in the morning I managed to fall off my bicycle and then when I was showing somebody how to ice skate I fell over and cracked a rib. All this pain because we were out celebrating a whole bunch of cool projects that had come to an end during the year. Not content with merely cracking...(read more)

SQL Data Compare 6 API

Richard Mitchell — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 14:42:00 GMT

OK I admit it. During the development of SQL Data Compare 6 in order to get the product out on time we had to sacrifice doing the SQL Toolkit 6 help ( it didn't involve chickens). So I thought I'd write a little bit to get you started on the v6 stuff as it seems to be coming up.Those of you who've played with the latest version will appreciate how thoroughly cool comparing to a backup of a database is. So what we've done is given you that coolness in the latest version of the SQL Toolkit API. All...(read more)

SQL Data Compare 6 RC1 - oh yes indeedy!

Richard Mitchell — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 19:41:00 GMT

You've been waiting for it, we've been working on it and finally the day has arrived. SQL Data Compare 6 RC1 is available for download Right Now!Download RC1 here...We've very proud of what we've achieved with this release. You can compare to backups even better than you could in the Alpha. We've finished off all the features and we're just going through the final testing within Red Gate for the release but we thought we'd let you see it as it currently is.Briefly the main cool new features are......(read more)

iPodtastic

Richard Mitchell — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 18:13:00 GMT

Just to let you know that we're contacting the people who've helped out with the SQL Data Compare 6 Alpha and are in the process of getting your likkle iPods to you as I speak.Thanks to everybody who helped out, the release is looking really good now, we're just doing a few last bug fixes then it's ready for install testing. I hope to put a release candidate up for the really keen to try out next week the final release being early October.Also I've noticed that I've lately become addicted to anonymous...(read more)

What's in a name?

Richard Mitchell — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 13:27:00 GMT

Until recently I wouldn't have said much. I'm talking about software release names rather than personal names - I quite like my name, it was the name my Grandad on my dads side who died when my dad was still quite young. But apart from that, I'm talking about the terms that seems to be bandied around almost interchangeably recently.Words like Alpha and Beta have been the fodder of software releases for a good long while, then new acronyms started to appear like mushrooms in a school football field...(read more)

SQL Data Compare 6 Alpha - Out Now

Richard Mitchell — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 14:22:00 GMT

Fresh off the presses and with the ink still drying we've pushed SQL Data Compare 6 Alpha out of the door.There are full release notes available here which tells you how to download it and the issues we know about.The product is supported only via the forums which can be found here.Some of the cool stuff for you to play with is.Compare to backups, be they full or differential, SQL Server or SQL Backup.'pivot' view - our new visualisation for table differencesProjects are more file basedHope you enjoy...(read more)

SQL Data Compare 6 Alpha due out next week

Richard Mitchell — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:52:00 GMT

After over 3 months of hard graft we're getting ready to give you the chance to get your fingers on the Alpha of the next version of SQL Data Compare. We're currently just doing some final install testing and hope to release it next week.Bear in mind the product is an Alpha and as such it isn't actually complete yet, some of the features that didn't make it yet are...Backup before synchUI for project actions warningsUI to allow you to select backup files from multiple directoriesHowever we're really...(read more)

Beware ye of ancient columns

Richard Mitchell — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:55:00 GMT

I'm sure you all make changes to your schema over time adding columns to tables and occassionally dropping them. But were you aware that even though you drop a column from a table the space in the row continues to be taken up by the ghost of the column that you deleted. So if you make lots of schema changes to a database over time the row becomes much larger than it needs to be.Of course this has the interesting effect that in the syscolumns table the colid for your rows aren't sequential so they...(read more)

How to tell you've created something truly special.

Richard Mitchell — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 12:54:00 GMT

In my history as a programmer there are a few occasions that stand out when I feel I've written something truly special (yes there's a Red Gate bit but that comes later). The difficulty I generally find is how to quantify special. Mainly I think of this of the user being able to use the thing produced for something that it was originally not designed to do, or some feature that is obvious that users enjoy and make use of.Now I admit, I'm not a back-office programmer, there's nothing I like less than...(read more)

The trials of usability trials of SQL Data Compare 6

Richard Mitchell — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 17:38:00 GMT

Don't you just love them. You write your UI, you think you design you code you fix you bug fix again when testers break everything in sight you perform usability trials on people and they don't even find that feature you worked on for 2 weeks.Well ok it's not quite that bad and this is one of the reasons why we're so keen on running usability trials for Red Gate tools that we produce. We've just started the usability trials for the upcoming SQL Data Compare 6 Alpha and it looks like there's going...(read more)

SQL Data Compare 6 Alpha on the horizon

Richard Mitchell — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 13:44:00 GMT

In between the bouts of champagne for new product launches, eating the yoghurts and drinking the smoothies from the 'feel good fridge'. In between the free Thursday lunches and punting on the Cam we manage to get a surprising amount of work done here at Red Gate.In fact I've been radio silent for the past couple of months mainly as we've been slogging away at the upcoming new version of SQL Data Compare 6. Now if you thought SQL Data Compare 5 was a step forward with it's amazing schema/table and...(read more)

Cut-n-paste your code nicely

Richard Mitchell — Thu, 17 May 2007 14:48:00 GMT

One thing that has annoyed me quite a lot lately is the way that cut-n-paste code from visual studio 2005 fails to look nice in emails. Your tabs dissappear you very large line gaps for every new line in your code and it sets the text to be a very strange font. Now maybe it's just me and my usage of the ancient Outlook 2003 but this has always bugged me.I do tend to send code snippits to quite a few people via email to clear up problems with programming for ANTS Profiler and SQL Toolkit (look ma'...(read more)