Lotushints

This year’s post count is getting a +1.

I wish you all a belated merry Christmas and a really happy, healthy and successful new year 2012.

A few months back I wrote this article on DB2 Data Provider for .NET, describing issues with .NET provider and certain DB2 SQL commands e.g. CURRENT DATE function or CASE statement. As this things go, it took several months to communicate things with IBM tech support and I have to say they were very responsive and managed to tilt me only once. So kudos to them.

Good news is that IBM Tech support did acknowledge this issue. Unfortunately, the bad news is, they cannot do nothing about it, as the problem is in SQL parser in Visual Studio, which uses Other parser for DB2 queries and hence finds a problem with non-standard functions.  I was a tad startled by their solution that I should contact Microsoft on this issue. Now, I don’t want to claim that Microsoft doesn’t care about their customer satisfaction, as that would be a lie. However, I sincerely doubt that they care that DB2 Data Provider for .NET, which is IBM’s plug-in for a product that is supposed to be a competition to their MSSQL. works at all.

So, as IBM is not going to talk with Microsoft about this issue, and I am certainly not, it appears that all we can do is wait that one of the big guys comes to their senses and does something about it. Until then, you can use a workaround, which will require you to remove all case statements and CURRENT DATE calls from your typed data-sets at point of creation. You can add them on later and despite reported error, it will work. But beware that data-set will not get generated, if you keep case statements and CURRENT DATE calls.

So working as I always do with Firefox – you know, several windows, kazillion of tabs – I have lately discovered that my PC was running slow nearing the end of a working day. Now, for first 100 times, I just ignored the fact that my 3,33 GHz Core i5 Workstation with 4GB of RAM running windows XP shouldn’t be running like this. At least it was not a week or two ago. Yesterday however, I had quite enough of it and decided to consult task manager and see what is eating up my RAM. Two processes stood out:
a) Visual studio (three instances of it to be exact) that ate up about 700MB of RAM and
b) Firefox 6 (two instances) eating up a nice sum of 520MB of RAM.

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As you might have read, I am lately doing a lot of stuff in .NET with DB2 as a database server. In the past, the only way to connect to a DB2 database from .NET environment was via ODBC. Nowadays, IBM provides us with DB2 data provider for .NET. On top of that, launch of DB2 data provider kind of made ODBC connection unsupported. Fine. Data provider is slicker anyway.

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Recently, I have been working on a .NET application that uses DB2 as a database engine. On top of that, I needed transactions as I didn’t want for SQL statements to commit if one of them failed. Needless to say, DB2 uses it’s own principle to handling transactions.

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This past month I was really really silent. Reason is quite simple. After 11 years, I have decided it was time to jump ship. It wasn’t a decision one would make lightly and you can trust me, it caused several sleepless nights. Specially as this was my first real gig.

Lotus Notes development will now be put aside. My expertise and knowledge in C++ and .NET development will be challenged and I look forward to it.

What does this mean for this blog? This blog was meant to be a Lotus Notes tips & tricks repository. Even in the past that was about 50% of my posts. In the future, Lotus Notes tips & tricks will probably drop significantly. They will be replaced by .NET tips and experiences I gain in my further escapades.

I have upgraded company’s Sametime server recently. Yes, that is correct. Sametime server. Singular. We are not that big of a company per IBM measures and even if we were, we are only using IM function of it anyway, so there is no point of using more than one server. But that is not important.

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A few days hence, I had an interesting debate with one of my best friends about data used in a demo. He is convinced that real user data (e.g. Name, Surname, email etc.) should be used even in a demo. I, on the other hand, am impervious to weather you use fake, real-enough or real data. As long as it is visible that e.g. email is an email.
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…and a happy new year 2011 to everyone.

Due to personal interest, I installed Android SDK and emulator on my machine. Now, since I am a programmer, I am most interested in actually developing applications for Android. Hence, I installed Eclipse ADT plug-in.
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