Frans Bouma's blog

Additional Note:
I've changed the title of this article. The title is a hint from Robert. While I think blogging is about ventilating personal opinions, I do not feel it's my duty to bring Scott and this site (because the blogs are in the main feed) in trouble.

Today an interesting thread was started on the DOT-NET CLR mailing list. The topic: a possible memory leak can occur when you are not careful with XSL transformations or compiled regular expressions. The reason for these memory leaks is that the CLR is generating IL behind the scenes and generated IL cannot be unloaded from an AppDomain unless the complete AppDomain is unloaded. Garbage Collection (GC) is not fixing this. The XSL transformations which will cause trouble are the ones which have to deal with XSL stylesheets with JScript embedded. The JScript is compiled into IL and as said, this will never be unloaded.

Simon Mourier wrote a large blog about debugging and sums up several points why debugging is still a PITA and that during all those years debuggers are still well.. harsh and cumbersome.

A few days ago, I blogged about a serious flaw in the ASP.NET editor in Visual Studio.NET 2003. Now, don't get me wrong, I really find it stunning this Bad Boy^TM is still around, and according to the follow ups to Mike Moore's posting in the usenet thread about this issue, more people are seriously offended by this lack of customer support, but... Visual Studio.NET 2003 isn't all bad. In fact, some great enhancements are finally available.

Several (ok, a lot) of people have been bitten by the "I-format-your-HTML-code-as-I-please"-bug in the ASP.NET HTML editor in Visual Studio.NET v2002. To recap what the bug does to you: you are working in HTML view on a page. You have to do this because f.e. you are working on a repeater template. Because you are a good developer, you create a readable layout of your code, so also for this HTML. When you come to the point where you have to add a control to your ASP.NET page, you have to switch over to design view, drag it from the toolbox onto the page, switch back to HTML view to add f.e. templates or additional properties or even position it correctly. When you switch back from design view to HTML view, your code sometimes (not allways) gets reformatted randomly, even if you switch off any auto-formatting feature in Visual Studio.NET. Hitting control-z undo's this formatting, but it gets annoying over time.

I've decided to post the code I used to test what's faster: dynamic queries or stored procedures with optional parameters. The code can be found here. Let me add a disclaimer here, that I'm not pretending to have done scientific research or other scientific benchmarking. All I've done is wrote a couple of routines which represent for me a real life situation using either one of the techniques. Of course the routines can be sped up and recoded in other forms, and perhaps I've made a mistake in the code which results in the slow speed of either one of the used techniques. Feel free to comment :)

All benchmarks are using the Northwind database on SqlServer. Northwind is shipped with every SqlServer installation as also the MSDE installation.

In Ted Graham's blog this morning he wrote a little text about the debate that is starting to show up here and there: is there a move away from 'Stored Procedures' towards 'Dynamic Created Queries' ? I think there is.