John Papa [MVP C#]

.NET Code Samples, Data Access, and Other Musings

September 2007 - Posts

The Day Copy and Paste Stopped Working

Wow. I admit that I take for granted the daily use of copy and paste features for hundreds of daily tasks. This past weekend I was creating PowerPoint slides for the upcoming Las Vegas DevConnections conference in November and I was copying and pasting some visual images repeatedly on the page. These were simple images, but being the horribly ungifted artist I was in no mood to recreate the image, I just wanted to copy and paste it a few times and change the text (I was using them to represent classes). Anyway, I soon found that copy and paste was not working. It just suddenly stopped. I then tried to copy/paste in Word, Outlook, NotePad, Quicken, and several other programs to no avail.

Anyway to avoid what was becoming a huge inconvenience I realized that I could copy and paste within my VPC image of Visual Studio 2008. Once I did that, I was able to copy and paste once again everywhere else. This bewildered me. So I did some searching on the web and found a few other people had run across the same issue. It appears that when running a VPC image there are times when copy/paste ceases to function on your entire PC. All you have to do is copy and paste within the VPC and its all back to good.

I can’t confirm the exact nature of this issue nor do I claim to really care J. I am just happy I got my copy/paste back!

Posted Sep 26 2007, 11:12 AM by John Papa with 11 comment(s)

Thoughts on the ThinkPad X61 Tablet PC

I am evaluating different laptop/tablet PC options that I will use for development, taking notes, and presenting technical content. I have zeroed in on the ThinkPad X61 tablet PC but as many of you know in our businsss we tend to require more power than most people in our equipment. I have also evaluated the Fujitsu Lifebook T4220 which seems to have a better CPU and screen, but lacks the 7200 RPM drive. So the reviews I have read have not really answered my question of how well this computer will perform for presentations hitting Virtual PC instances or for developing with Visual Studio.NET and SQL Server, for example. If any of you have any experience or have researched this, please let me know your thoughts. In return, I promise to give a detailed review of my experience with whatever purchase I end up with.

Posted Sep 23 2007, 12:29 AM by John Papa with 6 comment(s)

Designing SQL Server's Common Table Expressions (CTE's)

My October 2007 Data Points column has been posted to the MSDN Magazine web site. This edition is titled "SQL Server Common Table Expressions".

In this article I focus on using CTEs to address common development scenarios.

- describing how CTEs work

- scenarios they can be used to address

- advantages of using CTEs versus using traditional T-SQL constructs, such as derived tables, views, and custom procedures

- several examples

- how and where they can be used (where not to)

- how CTEs handle recursive logic

- define how a recursive CTE operates

As always, all the code I discuss in the column is available for download from the MSDN^® Magazine Web site and uses the Northwind and the AdventureWorks databases that come with SQL Server 2005.