I just could not resist reposting Scott Hanselman’s most recent post: 2009 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows.
I am currently waiting for parts to come to rebuild my home machine and install Windows 7 on. I cannot wait to review every item in this list to see if they increase my productivity!
Important lesson for those who prefer using GUIDs as record identifiers.
The MS SQL data type, uniqueidentifier, does not have a counterpart in Oracle. In the past it was easy to make the column CHAR(36), the max string length of a GUID. I was not in a situation to do this as we were dealing with the Entity Framework against Oracle.
Entity Framework is compatible with SQL Server out of the box and translates the uniqueidentifier column to GUID type. This is not the case for Oracle. The use of a third party adapter, dotConnect for Oracle, is required. This provider requires that the storage data type for GUID be RAW(16).
GUID representation
{922B0A87-7A88-DE11-BBA7-0AEA0522E79F}
RAW(16) representation
870A2B92887A11DEBBA70AEA0522E79F
As if it was not tough enough already to read and write a GUID. Now it is represented differently in Oracle!!??
The best solution that I discovered to get around this was through the use of a handy GUID Converter. I don’t know how many times I have relied on this to help me out.
A few months ago I started working on a new home project that I wanted to keep under source control. My only requirement was that it be closed-source as I wasn’t ready to share my idea with the world yet. I am cheap, and I decided to look for a free alternative first before I decided to pay someone. I stumbled upon XP-Dev.com.
What I get with XP-Dev Free:
XP-Dev.com has only suffered one outage since I’ve been with them, and the owner of the site was very vocal with what the status was for getting back online. For any new projects that you are working on, or if you want to have something under version control, I definitely suggest using XP-Dev.com.
I’m referring to the original SecurePaste application created by Jason Fayling. SecurePaste is a nifty application that allows developers to paste large documents (preferably source code) to each other and access it via URL. Amazingly simple idea, like I said, just make sure that you use the original one linked here in the post.