It has been a long time ago, but log4net has released a new version.
The release notes can be found here

Recently I purchased a new computer and I wanted to setup a RAID5 on 4x SATA Western Digital 200GB's. The motherboard is from Asus, the A8N SLI Deluxe which has 2 SATA controllers, the Silicon Image 3114R and NForce4. I also purchased a WD Raptor as boot disk which is connected to the NVRaid because it supports NCQ and the SI3114R not.

First of all I wanted to test if my raptor was faster than a normal 7200 rpm HD. And thankfully this was the case, it was about 10MB/s faster.

RAPTOR 74GB

7200RPM 200GB

After that I tested some RAID (0, 1, 10) configurations on the SI3114 controller. One thing was clear, that mirroring on the SI3114 isn't optimized for reading, it's even a little bit slower than reading from a single disk. This has also been confirmed in a review (images are broken) from xbitlabs, where they also conclude that it doesn't have any optimizations for mirrored arrays, but focuses on RAID0. As you can see from the benchmarks there is no performance gain in RAID 1 (left below image) against a single disk (right up image), and RAID10 performs like a RAID0.

RAID 1 STRIPE 64

RAID 10 STRIPE 64

So, the SI3114 was not an option for me. Then I looked for setting up a software raid in Windows XP. Yes indeed, you can build a RAID 5 in Windows XP after doing a little hack . For more information check out the article at tomshardware named Using WindowsXP to Make RAID 5 Happen.

Here I did a benchmark with a stripe size of 0.5 (default) and 64K. As you can see this gives a big difference.

RAID 5 STRIPE 0.5

RAID 5 STRIPE 64

From the benchmarks with default stripe size I conclude that the read performance of RAID5 is about the same compared to a single disk, but the write performance is about the half of a single disk. This solution did not satisfy for me, because the performance is not what I expected, consumes CPU and I don't like the idea that I had to enable it by hacking some DLLs in Windows and there were some issues with Service Pack 2.

Therefore I concluded to buy a PCI-Express SATA Raid controller, namely the Areca 1220. The Areca RAID controllers perform very well and include all the RAID features you need. A very detailed review with a lot of benchmarks can be found here.

The ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe does have 2x 8xPCI-Express ports, which can be used for example for one VGA card and a RAID card, it doesn't need to be 2 VGA cards. To be sure I sended an email to Asus to ask if the Areca controller is compatible with the motherboard. The Areca stand at CeBIT told me they sended controllers to different manufactors (Asus, MSI, etc.) to test the compatibility and will update the 'Compatibility list' on the website.

UPDATE:

Until now it's not yet possible to combine for example one VGA and one RAID card in an SLI Motherboard, it's a BIOS issue.

So, I hope getting more news soon

This weekend I visited CeBIT. It was a long trip due to road works and heavy rain, but it was worthwhile. There was a lot of people, but thankfully CeBIT at the Messegeländer in Hannover has about 30 halls. In one of the first halls, there was an exclusive car from Bugatti. Surprisingly there was no pricing indicated

I think it was at the expo from AOpen that a couple of case-mods were shown. One of the most original one was certainly this one:

One of the manufactors that i didn't want to miss was Asus. For me there were 2 things that caught my attention: the new A8N SLI Premium which is the succesor of the A8N SLI Deluxe and of course a DUAL Geforce 6800 Ultra on one board. As you can see the board is huge and I don't think it will fit on every motherboard and/or case, but it's still a prototype of course.

One of the things I focused on, was SATA PCI-Express RAID cards because I am planning to buy one for my system. The most well known RAID card in this category at this very moment is Areca, who were present too. The card that I am planning to buy is the ARC-1220 with 8x SATA ports.

HighPoint showed also their latest products and in particular the RocketRaid 2320, which is an 8 channels PCI-Express to SATA II host adapter. The new products are included in the product guide that I took from the stand at CeBIT. The products they showed are listed here.

I also went to 3Ware, and they told to me that the PCI-Express RAID cards will be released by November of this year.

It was a long weekend, and I spent most of the time in the car but it was fun and interesting. See you at CeBIT 2006

More info can be found here.

If it depends on Shawn Burke (Developer Division Program Manager) it must be possible to ship the Windows Forms source code and PDBs in version .NET 2.0. More information about that great idea can be found on the blog

This is really a dream for every programmer & gamer... The Grand Canyon Monitors

It has been a long time ago, but there is a new version of DasBlog.

More information and changes can be found here and can be downloaded here.

More information about CruiseControl.NET and the new features can be found here.

Apple announced today that iTunes is now available in Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain for €0.99 per song from a database of 700,000 songs.

From Patterns and Practices we can expect soon an Enterprise Library. This is a single application block that will integrate the most used application blocks. For the first release it will include:

• Data Access
• Exception Handling
• Caching
• Configuration
• Logging
• Security
• Cryptography

I am convinced that the Enterprise Library will be the defacto standard application block for each application/project. All the functionalities are so fundamental that you can't without it. Like the site mentions, it enforces Consistency, Extensibility, Ease of Use and Integration. The GodDotNet workspace for Enterprise Library can be found here.

FlexWiki is now the third application that Microsoft releases under an open-source licence. The first application was Windows Installer XML (WiX) and the second the Template Library (WTL). The source for FlexWiki can be found here.

I am currently working on a project where we have to interact several applications (COM, .NET, Linux, Java, etc.) together through a messaging system. One of the applications is a windows application that exposes an application object. In this way we can host it through .NET. The problem is that the application object doesn't expose any events; no exit, close or quit event. What I need to properly close the .NET host.

In contrast to the Win32 SendMessage you can use system hooks to listen to events from any application. But after googling I noticed that .NET doesn't support global hooks! The only way to accomplish, is to make an unmanaged C++ DLL that catches the system hooks, and the .NET DLL will receive them. An example of that can be found on CodeProject Global System Hooks in .NET. Unfortanetly it only receives mouse and keyboard events, so I have to extend it to receive application events.

 

I think one of the most popular code snippet tools is Code Library for .NET. I don't know how it's with the current version, but all previous versions I tested were very unstable. But it really has all the features I need for a code snippet tool.

I found some other code snippet tools named CodeKeeper.NET and SnippetBox.NET. It's surprising that the two sites are very similar, just search/replace of some text . Unfortunately it's not for free.

I wonder what you guys use as code snippet tool...

This was a nice surprise, KITT from the famous TV series Knight Rider is for sale on eBay! 
The item on eBay can be found here, it starts from $40,000.00

Apparently there is also a Knight Con 2004 in August 20th till August 22nd in the Theme Park Warner Bros. Movieworld in Bottrop–Kirchhellen (Germany).

Sony Ericsson announced today the P910 smartphone, more information about the release can be found here.
A review about the P910 smartphone can be found at My-Symbian.com.

Marc Clifton added a nice introduction to declarative versus imperative programming.

Imperative programming (source)
Describes computation in terms of a program state and statements that change the program state.

Declarative programming (source)
Gives the computer a list of instructions to execute in a particular order, declarative programming describes to the computer a set of conditions and lets the computer figure out how to satisfy them

Like Marc Clifton describes in the article, we are already using declarative techniques like resource files, config files, etc. Many libraries like FABRIQ, User Interface Process Application Block for .NET, log4net, etc. uses a XML file to describe a sort of workflow in a declarative way.

Therefore I try to use it where possible on every project. Certainly when it comes to making forms. I just hate the generated code inside the InitializeComponent of a form/control, it is more elegant, readable and maintainable by describing it in a declarative way. For example a menubar would look like this:

instead of a bunch of statements that are needed for declaration, initialisation, setting properties and to composite the controls together. In this way it is also very hard to see the relationships between the objects!

I've seen on MSDN that the WebBrowser control has a new event in SP2, named NewWindow3 . It's an extension to the NewWindow2 event with additional info in the eventargs. The url that initiates the new window, and the url where the new window is redirecting to.

I am pretty sure that this has something to do with the new popup blocker that will be added in Windows XP SP2 :)

Novell announced the release of version 1.0 of Mono yesterday. More information can be found here.

I am not sure if we will hear about it at TechEd2004 :)

The second day at TechEd I followed 2 sessions about ASP.NET 2.0 where the speaker demonstrated a lot of nice new controls and features. One of the features I like most (call it a feature or a bug-fix), is that the designer does NOT mess your aspx code anymore, which is a very good thing, I think it was called 'HTML preserve' :).Features like, themes/skins, a tool for deploying your web application, role based management, navigation control, a bunch of login related controls (registration, login, lost your password, etc.), ...

After that there was the Belgian Day which was very well organized and was really fun (I don't have to mention that a lot of people watched the football :)

The first opening key note was very entertaining and refreshing. There was an introduction of the team services in VS.NET, a demo with 3d-glasses on a 64-bit platform, a promising project called SkyServer.org, announce of the Express edition of VS.NET, and many other things.

It's very well organized, everybody at TechEd receives a login where you can check your email, surf on the internet, you receive a bag with a huge set of goodies and documentation, etc.

I just returned from a session of FABRIQ which can be downloaded on GotDotNet and it's a very nice messaging architecture that can be interesting on the project I am currently working on. So, be prepared Tom, Franco and Peter when I come back to Belgium :)

Now we are going to eat something...

greetz from A'dam