Visual Studio 2010

Just as the dust was settling on Visual Studio 2008 the new Visual Studio 2010 is already in a good phase of development(atleast that's what the screen shot says). Visual Studio 2010 has a completely new UI that Microsoft claims is more than just a face lift - it has more punch under the hood.

Click to Enlarge the Screenshot of Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 has been re-designed with features such as a reorganized layout with file menus and commands on a “shelf” at the top of the IDE. As you can clearly see fom the screenshot, Microsoft has now begun to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for the evolution of toolbars and menu bars.

Visual Studio 2010 will also feature a new UI with which developers will be able to enjoy additional real estate space because of multi-monitor support and can also simply drag source code windows to a secondary monitor. Rather cool I must say!!

SQL Server :: Why does sp_help and Design View column length have variations in results?

Well, the question of Why does sp_help and Design View column length have variations in results? has been a Million Dollar question for my SQL geek friend in office. She was confronted with this issue where the column length appears differently when sp_help is used and the correct column length is visible in design view.

Being a SQL geek herself, she usually only uses command line commands (like sp_help) to get the information she needs - but this was a very hard nut for her to crack. Well, she did crack it last evening and here's the detailed explanation on why the variations appear. Hope this information is useful for others who are struck with a similar investigation.

When we use sp_help to check the properties of the table, the length of every column which is of Unicode data type (Nchar, Nvarchar, etc.) is doubled than the original column width which can be seen in design view.

For eg. If we have a column whose data type is Nvarchar(25). When we use sp_help for this table, the column length appears 50. But when we open the table in design view it shows 25.

This is because Unicode data type takes 2 bytes for storing data. And sp_help uses int to display the length of the column.

Hope that added some gyan to you too.

How to easily install Adobe Photoshop CS4 11.0.1 Update on an existing Photoshop CS4 Installation

Adobe has recently released a new update called 11.0.1 for it's Photoshop CS4 - the most powerful photo editing software currently available. Photoshop CS4 is used by professionals around the world on both Mac and PC environments. But the Version 11.0.1 update has been giving many users a lot of issues in installing the update.

I have given a list of easy steps to install the Photoshop CS4 11.0.1 Update on your system without any issues. Follow the easy steps of installation below:

P.S: You can download the update 11.0.1 here.

• First of all, Disable all the anti-virus softwares in your system.
• Next, you will have to ensure that the folder on your hard drive which contains Photoshop is aptly named "Adobe Photoshop CS4".
• Now go ahead and double-click the "Adobe Photoshop Updater" application.
  
• Here's the challenge - If now, the updater throws a message saying that it cannot find the application to update. You have NO choice but to uninstall Photoshop CS4 and then reinstall Photoshop CS4 from scratch before trying to update again. (Note that the default folder is named as "Adobe Photoshop CS4"). On a Mac, to uninstall Photoshop, you'll have to navigate to the "Applications/Utilities/Adobe Installers" folder and run "Add or Remove Adobe Photoshop CS4" to remove the original installation of Photoshop. Once the removal is complete, reinstall Photoshop, and then try your luck again with the updater.
• Your almost done now - Just follow all the instructions on the screen.
• Finally to confirm that the updater has run successfully, launch Photoshop CS4 and verify that the version number on the splash screen shows 11.0.1 and not 11.0!!!

Well, according to Adobe development team - Photoshop CS4 11.0.1 will only work the retail version of Photoshop CS4 and not any pre-release (including the beta) versions.

Did you know? Gmail went Down and is Up again

Yes, Gmail went down for quite sometime yesterday. At most times it became totally inaccessible and at many times - one wasn't able to open the mails. GTalk integrated into Gmail didn't work for quite a lot of time yesterday. It was all very new in the world of Google for such a unprecedented outage and there were many of my friends who pinged / called to just clarify if it was really true that GMail has gone down - well the irony was YES!!

This incident has been confirmed by a post on the GMail Official Blog today and they have attributed the outage to some European Data Centers going down for regular maintenance and some new code in Gmail that kept sending requests to the Data Centers in the same region rather than load sharing. Google confirms that the issue has been identified and also fixed.

It may be recalled that only last month, a human error had forced Google to believe every site on the Internet was malware!!. Google search created flutters and a whole lot of online confusion when a glitch in its security programme temporarily warned users that websites from all search results were potentially harmful. All websites turned up in search results were marked as harmful and users received the message: "Warning! This site may harm your computer.", finally Google fixed it and attributed the error to a third party.

But yesterday's incident did bring gitters into many people thinking of the vast amount of persoanal e-mails and data stacked off in the Gmail accounts. As for me, I already am using 4947 MB (close to 5 GB) or 67% of the Gmail storage limit.