Buying the Right Photo Equipment, by Elin Rantakrans, O'Reilly Media

In this 128 pages book, Elin Rantakrans aims to help newbies photographers find the right gadgets to fit their shooting style.

The photo equipment is divided into few major chapters: lenses, filters, tripods, flash, protecting gear, other accessories and computer software. Browsing through the wide variety of photo equipment, each gear type is presented with the purpose and the photography style that it is better suited for. I like the concise presentation, the pictures to exemplify each usage of the gear and the tips for each photography. However, I'd have definitively preferred to see the settings of each pictures and maybe a short story of why the photographer decided for that lens/gear.

If you are a beginner, the book is a definite must read. Is a very easy lecture that would surely get your photos to a next level. I consider myself an intermediate photographer and I think I had quite a lot to read from. I'm sure the part about flash and the ones about software can give many photographers new ideas.

The book doesn't go into details of specific equipment brands and models, but that would make the book become obsolete very soon after being published. After all, there are plenty of review websites for photography gear, so after one decides what type of equipment he/she needs the search for the right model is a matter of time spent into deciding what's best for your camera + budget + style. Of course, be warned that if you are serious about photography your camera&accessories bag will soon become pretty heavy.

The book is a very useful and very easy reading. I'll definitely recommended it to my friends having  photography as their hobby.

Fast Query but Slow Stored Procedure

Few days ago we had a problem that I encountered years ago while working in Italy.
Basically a Stored Procedure is very slow. So slow that we didn't wait for it to finish, it probably more than 30 minutes. Let's not forget to mention that I'm running it on SQLServer 2008.
That query taken outside the stored procedure an run with the same parameters in SQLServer Management Studio runs in only few seconds. Since back in Milan I saw the same behaviour (on SQLServer 2005 that time) I thought I have the answer and can impress the colleagues with a fast solution: using  WITH RECOMPILE clause.
However, the result was the same...very slow stored procedure.
After searching the Internet we found the answer here. Parameters sniffing.  Explained here as "the process of using the parameter value to estimate selectivity and cardinality".
Indeed, our query is pretty complex and it looks like SQLServer did not know to re-create the execution plan. After changing the parameters' names, everything was OK.

Maps in SSRS 2008 R2

We don't want to use Dundas Maps anymore, so I started using the maps provided by Microsoft within SSRS 2008 R2. The first problem I encountered is an error while I try to preview the map:
"Map1 was detected in the report. SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services does not support map report items"

The solution is here

Nature and Landscape Photography, by Martin Borg, O'Reilly Media

This post is not at all about a problem in SQLServer or compiling issues but a book review. Why ? Because is all about enjoyment. In “Nature and Landscape Photography” Martin Borg is presenting a very nice collection of tips for better photography in the outdoors.
Out of many photography books, I was attracted by this one because is written by a Swedish photographer. As nature photography is one of my hobbies, and considering I leave in Stockholm, I was expecting subjects, magical hours and type of landscape to be similar to what I encounter here around Stockholm, and I was not disappointed. This is an easy lecture of 71 short tips from Martin Borg, illustrated with his own pictures. A nice feature is the editor’s insertion of details about each photography. A beginner to intermediate amateur can really benefit from this tips. Many of them are indeed not new, but some are very interesting.
I would’ve probably preferred to have more technical details and more of compositional hints, as well as a little bit of the way the photographer reached to that composition or developed the idea that led to the image. But this is not a manual of photography, is just a collection of tips.
With this book Martin Borg manages to make you wish to go out in the nature and practice the tips (which I did, taking advantage of the nice autumn weather that we had during the first week-end after reading the book). Don’t be scared if you don’t own a Hasselblad camera like the author does, with a decent SLR and a stable tripod you can still reach good results.
For me, the book was useful for a couple of ideas that I probably read before but I was neglecting, some new hints (like breathing on lens, playing with fantasy vs. reality, revealing nature’s strength), as well as for triggering my interest for using neutral density filters.
All in one, the book is a useful and enjoyable reading. I already recommended it to a friend who’s starting with photography.

Canot debug clickonce app

I have a  .NET app that used to work. Now I stumble upon this very annoying problem. I cannot debug.

---------------------------
                Microsoft Visual Studio
                ---------------------------
                The following module was built either with optimizations enabled or without debug information:

                C:\[....].DLL

                To debug this module, change its project build configuration to Debug mode. To suppress this message, disable the 'Warn if no user code on launch' debugger option.
                ---------------------------
                OK  
                ---------------------------

I've seen the proposed solution here, but this just suppress the error message.

VisualStudio 2008

Any ideas ?

stuff

Well, I often need to create a comma-separated list out of values in a table.

here I found this pretty ellegant sollution:

STUFF(

(

SELECT ', ' + Supplier_ID

FROM SomeTable

join SomeOtherTable

on Something

WHERE SomeCondition

FOR XML PATH('')), 1, 1, '') as AllSuppliers

Execution order differs with rendering mode

Today our tester found a big saying "Incorrect numbering of the tables in the PDF export".
The issue is that we have a custom code function incrementing a number and than returning the resulting number. It starts from 0 and it'll return 1 first time it is called, 2 afterwards, 3 and so on. It works fine when my report renders in HTML, but not when it renders as PDF. The first table is numbered with 5 and the rest are numbered in order 1 to 4

The only difference between the first table and the rest is that the first table displays the table number in a row, while for the rest I had to add a text box above the table.

Apparently, the execution order of custom code is different when report is rendered in browser vs when it renders as PDF. I did a simple test by creating a test report, with just a matrix, a table and a text box and the textbox is indeed rendered first (it executes the custom code first). Only after, the tablixes are rendered

SSRS 2008 incorrect number of TablixCornerCell

I got a "nice" error today , while working on a report converted from SSRS 2005 to SSRS 2008.

Error 1 [rsWrongNumberOfTablixCornerCells] The tablix ‘matrix4’ has an incorrect number of TablixCornerCell. The number of TablixCornerCell within TablixCornerRow at index: 0 must equal the number of levels in the TablixRowHierarchy containing TablixHeaders.

Update , 2012-02-10: I fixed the problem by simply reading carefully the error message. All I did was adding an empty <TablixCornerCell></TablixCornerCell> into the <TablixCornerRow>

Sometimes VS 2008 cannot access DataSource file

Today, for the second time since we started using SSRS 2008 I had the following stupid error:
Running a dataset works from VS designed, but when I try to run the report (again, from the VS2008 designer) I get errors (DS couldn't be run)

After little investigation I realize that the problem is in fact that the report cannot be built. I had VS2008 access to RDS file denied. this is not a read-only file, is checked-out, so VS should be able to access the file and change it.
However, VS keeps telling that access to {MyReportsFolder}\bin\Debug\{MyDataSource.rds} is denied
The only way I found to fix this was to delete the folder {MyReportsFolder}\bin and rebuild.

Weird...

Error in SSIS VS2005

Yesterday I had to put some code into SSIS packages.
Being a lazy person, what I usually do is copying one of the existing task ("Execute SQL Task") and changing the name and the code itself. Apparently after installing VS2005 SP1 this was not working anymore.

I had to create every "Execute SQL Task", set the connection, etc....which is not a lot but is slower than what I was used to.

The error message I was receiving while trying to copy was "An error occurred while objects were being copied. SSIS Designer could not serialize the SSIS runtime objects". A fast google search revealed this page and the easy fix by jaegd:

Register the xml parser dlls with the below commands.

regsvr32.exe msxml3.dll
regsvr32.exe msxml6.dll

It really worked and fixed my problem, but lets me wondering why Microsoft didn't fix it and release a SP2 with all this fixes.