Quango's space

Google has released a Firefox add-in called Page Speed., which integrates with Firebug on Firefox. This analyses a web page and makes recommendations on how the performance of the page and web site can be improved.

I've just tried it and it's very impressive - not only does it recommend things like optimising the graphics in a page or minifying JavaScript, it actually does the work for you and you can just download the optimised version and use it in your website.

A must-have tool for any web developer!!

Downloaded and experimenting with Release Candidate of Windows 7. I'm using the x86 version in a Virtual PC session (with 'Vista' setting). I plan to switch to Win7 once the release version appears by reinstalling my Vista x64 main workstation. That will be a long, unproductive day!

Installation: No obvious changes except new background graphics. The glowing windows logo is the same as the beta, followed by a cool graphic during "preparing for first use".

Configuration: Same

Appearance: Very similar to beta - could not see any obvious changes

Performance: The Win7 test was in a Virtual PC session with 2Gb of memory, running on a quad core box (but only one cpu assigned). Performs ok but a bit slow on clicking and UI (as one would expect with a virtual PC). May improve if I add the virtual machine addons.

Came across an annoying bug in LINQ to SQL today. I have a process that uploads orders to a supplier service via the web. The process used work fine before I moved to LINQ to SQL.. now for some reason it wasn't updating the order state.

I checked and rechecked my code - I had a loop that ran

 order.SetStatusAsSent()

Stepping thru the code I could see this had the simple code

  Me.OrderStateID = 2 ' 2 represents the order state 'sent'
  Me.OtherInfo = "Order sent"

Problem was that it wasn't saving the OrderStateID change. I had a .SubmitChanges statement right after the loop.. but examining the SQL I see it only updated the OtherInfo field.

I eventually figured out (after some headscratching) that because I had loaded the related object to the OrderStateID - which is a foreign key field - using DataLoadOptions - it was ignoring the change.

I changed the code to load the related object thus:

  Dim newState = db.OrderStates.Single(Function(s) s.OrderStateID=2
  Me.OrderState = newState
  Me.OtherInfo = "OrderSent"

Now the code works as expected. A nasty one!

When I first upgraded to Vista I had a horrendous time with network copying issues. The new networking stack in Vista was different to XP and caused lots of problems. For many people local copies to and from servers seemed to be the issue, but for me it was copying files over a VPN.

This VPN link worked fine with XP to the remote W2003 server and would copy large files (say 8MB) without problems.

Vista had a problem, and it appears that the fault lies in the router or possibly in how Vista tries to optimise the file copy, which would essentially reset its connection half way through the copy and re-establish it. I never managed to fix this and even the SP1 fixes didn't change this situation.

Now I have a Win7 beta running on VPC I've just been testing this over the VPN and to/from local servers and things look like they are a LOT better. In particular the VPN copies do not seem to cause restarts on the router/VPN so it looks like Microsoft has spent a bit of time on this area.

Revised

Looks like I was fooled by something, as it does not seem to be fixed. The problem is I cannot identify where the issue lies - at the router or Vista/Win7. I suspect it's a problem with the router but this is difficult to pin down.

Worse still I've found that even when I use the inbuilt dial-up VPN within Vista similar problems are happening with large transfers. I will set up a Win7 RC client on a test machine and see if it is still there.

An interesting idea being developed is LinqObjectDataSource on Nikhil's blog - a sort of "best of both worlds" data source control that permits in-line LINQ queries rather than the fragmented approach of the LinqDataSource in the basic 3.5 toolkit.