Gerd’s Blog

Our team is using the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for nearly 2 Years now and I have to admit that its handling still surprises me sometimes. The application we are developing uses the database heavily for some scenarios and last week we had to recognize that some concurrent situations take the Server into an undefined state. At the moment we are developing on an Vista 64-Bit but we had tested it on Windows XP too. The interesting part was that some machines run into some kind of endless locking on the database and some didn’t. We invested hours analyzing the situation, when the locking issue occurred but we couldn’t find the problem. We tried lock hints, optimizing the SQL  statements - all the stuff you can imagine but nothing worked out. In the end after several hours of searching through the web we found some Feedback in the MS Sql Server Connect site. I really like the term Feedback here - it does not speak about Bugs which most of them are. In the end it came out that the KB928365 Security Update for .NET Framework was the initiator of our problem. After de-installing it from the XP ad Windows 2003 Machines everything worked correct just on some Vista Machines we still have the same problems. The Security Update came out about 2 weeks ago so it was hard to find the problem - 2 weeks early everything worked correct.
Don’t get me wrong I like C# and the CLR and all the possibilities you have but in this situation you like self controlled environments where nobody other than you decide which version is used by you product.

As I mentioned in one of my last posting titled Location != Language, I do not like the idea Google chooses the language to present it’s website to us. At least the web search was using the default US - site until last week. Since then I always got the localized search results which are not appropriate for me special if I am searching for computer science stuff. I needed some solution to fix this so after searching a little bit I step over an interesting posting. In the end there was a solution for my problem: “Meanwhile, if you want to use the standard version of Google, click on “Google.com in English” at the bottom of any Google homepage or type google.com/ncr in your address bar. Google’s cookie will save your preference, so the next time you go to google.com you won’t be redirected to the local version.“

I tried it and it works perfect. Just enter “google.com/ncr” once and the cookie will do the rest for you. Hopefully this help some of you to get better search results in the future. I have not found a solution for the other Google services e.g. Bloggers but maybe there will be one in the future.