My "Read These" Folder #2

My second "Read These" links... I first talked about my Read These folder, here.

One thing I miss when using Blogger/BlogSpot are categories... It would be nice to have a category for these posts. Of course I could start a new blog, but that seems like overkill. And keeping one personal blog updated is hard enough (plus I like have a single remote memory space to search...)


Customizing MSI Installation
"Go beyond the basics of creating setup routines in Visual Studio .NET! Vishnu Prasad H explores setup project templates, editors, custom installers, and more. Then he pulls it all together in an example that deploys a database application."

VB-Helper: Stick to the Script
"No matter how hard you try, you can never anticipate every user's needs. And whether you get paid by the hour or by the product release, constantly adding new features can be alluringly profitable, although often tedious. However, if you build enough flexibility into your applications, users can often implement their own solutions. This month, Rod Stephens explains how to add scripting to your VB.NET programs. Then, when your users ask for a new feature, you can tell them to do it themselves."

The Fallacy of the Data Layer by Rocky Lhotka
"It is commonly held as a truth that applications have a UI layer, a business layer and a data layer. In most of my presentations and writing I use a four layer model: UI, business, data access and data storage. In this case the "data storage" layer is really the same as the traditional data layer in a 3-layer model.
But I want to challenge this idea of a data layer. Over the past few months, in discussing service-orientation (SOA) as well as distributed object-oriented architecture, I have become increasingly convinced that the idea of a data tier, data layer or data storage layer is fundamentally flawed."

A BLOB of a Different Color
"You might be used to BLOBs in ADO, but a BLOB in ADO.NET is a completely different animal
Michael Otey
Converting legacy ADO applications to ADO.NET requires a lot of work, and one of the hardest parts of moving to ADO.NET is converting BLOB import or export code. Although many features in ADO.NET are closely related to those in ADO, BLOB access isn't one of them. In ADO, you manipulate BLOB data by using the standard Recordset and Field objects with either the Field object's chunking methods or the Stream object. However, none of those objects exists in ADO.NET. In ADO.NET, you can use the SqlDataReader to retrieve BLOB data from your SQL Server database, then use the ADO.NET DataSet and DataField objects to import BLOB data from the file system into SQL Server."

HOW TO: Read and Write a File to and from a BLOB Column by Using ADO.NET and Visual Basic .NET
"This article explains how to read and write data from BLOB (LongVarBinary) columns in a database table."

HOW TO: Read and Write a File to and from a BLOB Column by Using Chunking in ADO.NET and Visual Basic .NET
"This step-by-step article describes how to use the Microsoft SQL Server READTEXT and UPDATETEXT statements to read and write data from BLOB (LongVarBinary) columns in a database table.

Unlike with ADO 2.6 and later, ADO.NET does not support reading and writing BLOB objects by using Stream objects. ADO.NET data providers do not have GetChunk and AppendChunk methods available to the Data Access Object (DAO) and ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) Recordset objects. To read a BLOB field for in-memory manipulation, you can use a DataReader object to select the row, or you can cache the data in a DataSet.

However, if you want to stream the data to a different medium, such as disk or Web response, then you can read the BLOB from the server in smaller chunks to minimize the amount of memory that the process consumes. This is especially important in Web Forms applications, where you may have multiple concurrent applications running at the same time and you want to conserve memory resources. "

How To Read and Write BLOB Data by Using ADO.NET with Visual Basic .NET
"The GetChunk and the AppendChunk methods are not available in ADO.NET to read and write binary large object (BLOB) fields. This article describes how to use the FileStream object and a byte array to read and to write BLOB data from Microsoft SQL Server to a file."


Can you tell I was doing ADO.Net BLOB research? :)