Frans Bouma's blog

Follow these easy steps. The first 4 steps you only have to do ONCE in your life. Step 5-7 you only have to do ONCE per project.

1. Open a command prompt
2. Type vsvars32.bat (enter) or navigate to the .NET bin dir
3. Type: sn -k mykey.key (enter)
4. Move mykey.key to a folder where it gets backupped daily, for example: c:\myfiles\keys\
5. Open your code's solution in Visual Studio.NET
6. Open the AssemblyInfo class in the editor
7. For the attribute AssemblyKeyFile(), specify instead of the default "", the full path of your key, in our example this is "c:\myfiles\keys\mykey.key", so the attribute in full will be:
   C#: [assembly: AssemblyKeyFile("c:\\myfiles\\keys\\mykey.key")]
   VB.NET: <Assembly: AssemblyKeyFile("c:\myfiles\keys\mykey.key")>
8. Compile your solution. After compilation, your assembly is signed with your strong key.
9. To congratulate yourself with this big achievement, walk to the fridge and pop open a fresh Heineken.

All of a sudden, people start blogging about O/R mapping, thanks to Steve Eichert. Thanks Steve! :) There is however a funny thing going on in some of those blogs: they use the term ORM.

It seems some people think they're funny by posting comments under my name in other blogs, or flooding my blogs with crapcomments.

I blogged yesterday about my concerns related to weblogs.asp.net, Microsoft, its employees moving to this site and my blog on that same site. A lot of reactions were posted and some good arguments were given. I have to agree that when you have something to say about company X and its products, the best place to do that is where company X communicates to the world, and this site is one of those places. I have decided to stay for now, however Fabrice had some very good points: the image of this site is wrong; which was proven by a reaction of Andrew in the same thread. Brilliant :).

With the invasion of MS employees and with the amount of solely pro-Microsoft blogs very recently, I more and more feel less at home here, since I have the feeling it is not that appropriate to say something less pro-Microsoft, with all the Microsoft employees now moving to weblogs.asp.net. I'm considering moving my blog elsewhere because of this.

Eric blogs that his company SourceGear is the ideal candidate to fill up the gap that is open at the moment in the VSS department at Microsoft.

Now the discussion of yesterday about Dynamic SQL and Stored Procedures are slowing down, I'd like to mention a little thing that popped up during the debate: roundtrips.

Let me start with a blunt statement: stored procedures are bad, they are a bad way to formulate data-access logic. I can't state that enough. Today I stumbled into a blog by Rob Howard, which tries to convince the reader that whatever you do, use stored procedures! With tears in my eyes I've read the arguments he brings to the table. Some are silly and one is even based on completely wrong information and assumptions and so far away from the truth it hurts. I've blogged about stored procedures before (here, here and here) and I used them a lot for 8 years, but I'm now almost stored procedure 'free' for 8 months now, and I love the feeling. The reason is obvious: the stress of maintaining a lot of stored procedures, to write another stored procedure for each thing you want to do, is gone. Dynamic SQL is the future. (Dynamic SQL is generated on the fly by a generic piece of code which gets various data as input and generates a parametrized query from it. Which can be cached on the client and will be cached on the server. Dynamic SQL generated based on objects written in C# or VB.NET).