Over the past few months there has been a lot of discussions online about how embedding the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) into your application opens up some amazing use cases. For example, Phil Haack recently wrote about how ASP.net MVC views can be stored in the database thanks for the DLR.  Resolver Systems have been doing with with great success.

Tonight, my latest article for Simple Talk was published. The article explains how I went about creating a new generator for SQL Data Generator which allows the user to define the data to be generated based on IronRuby code.  I think this is an amazing use case, both for SQL Data Generator and the DLR\IronRuby. By taking advantage of the DLR, we have opened up some extremely useful use-cases within the application. To find out more take a look at the article on Simple Talk.

An example of the generator in action is shown in the screenshot.

The article includes the source code and binaries for the SQL Data Generator example generator which you can start using within your project.

NOTE: This Plug-in generator is provided ‘as-is’ and is completely unsupported.

Labels: DLR, IronRuby, Red Gate

Not being able to use your mouse when writing a document in word makes life shall we say - difficult. Tonight, I had this happen. My keyboard worked fine, however the mouse simply wasn’t playing. I could select the menu items but if I tried to select anything within the document, it would simply ignore me. This made was not good!

After uninstalling a recent Windows Update (did nothing). I tried running the Office 2007 Diagnostic which reported everything as fine (it really wasn’t). I turned to a repair of the installation which also did nothing.

After a bit of searching, turns out you can start Word in safe mode my holding down control when you start the application. At this point I could use my mouse again. After a bit more searching, I came across this article - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921541. This suggests deleting the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data.

After doing this, Word recreated the key and everything was working again. I can now continue…

Labels: Bad Software

This weekend I was lucky enough to present ‘Creating extensible application using MEF’ at the DDD Belfast conference in, well, Belfast.  The conference itself we really well and I was happy with my session. Slides can be found on Slideshare any embedded below.

Feel free to download the Finished Demos from the presentation. 

Photos can be found on Barry’s blog, who I have to say did a great job of organising the conference, as did Craig and Phil.

Labels: Community, DDD, DDDBelfast, MEF

Here are the slides from my NHibernate session at SQLBits. Sorry for the delay in getting these up. 

Labels: SQLBits