Gareth Lennox

Yearly Archives: 2009

On Mono

So, I’ve been playing around with Mono on a virtual machine for a while now, and want to just put down some thoughts. Note that this won’t be an in-depth review of Mono, but just my initial experiences coming from a MS .net background.

MSI version matching upgrade woes

We’re distributing our .net application using Microsoft’s MSI installer technology (using the very powerful WiX to do it). We’ve recently seen a problem with the installer not upgrading older versions, but rather just installing on top of the existing version, which results in the application being listed twice in the “Add/remove programs” (Programs and Features […]

Don’t use @@IDENTITY

If you’re using SQL Server, and you’re inserting records into a table with an auto increment primary key, I suggest you don’t use @@IDENTITY to retrieve the previously inserted Id. Rather use SCOPE_IDENTITY(). The reason for this is that @@IDENTITY gives you the last generated Id in the current session vs. SCOPE_IDENTITY() gives you the […]

Google and search ranking

I’ve recently finished a new site for a client, and in the process of developing, I uploaded a test site to a web server for the client to review. Since going live with the actual site, I left the test site up and running (in the assumption that its less effort to leave it up […]