Confessions of a Keytarist

A SSIS package I wrote for a customer has all of a sudden stopped working correctly. Whilst no errors are raised, and the job completes successfully, it appears to “stop” on the very first task.

As the server the package is running on already had Visual Studio with “BITS” installed, I thought I’d just open the dtsx file up, hit debug and trace through it.
Imagine my surprise when, after opening the package, I found the “debug” options all greyed out!

After a bit of mucking around, I discovered that although you can debug a dtsx package, it first needs to be opened as part of a project, rather than directly as in my case. So, after creating a new project and simply adding in the dtsx package, I’m able to step through line by line..
Although it’s nothing major, it just seems a bit long winded.

What I’d also like to see is the ability to open packages that are already imported into SQL Server and then step through them immediately – that’d be cool

Whilst working on a work project, I needed to create a HTML table that would contain possibly hundreds of rows. The table was followed by a set of buttons that were required to remain on screen at all times (for a set resolution).

So I knew I needed to make the table scrollable, which isn’t exactly a hard task.
However, the top row of the table contained the column headers, which also needed to remain on screen at all times.
Achieving this is a very simple task in tools such as Microsoft Excel, but it wasn’t so straight forward for the web.

After playing around with several examples, all with varying degrees of success, I managed to piece it all together into a final version, which works on IE v6, v7 & v8, as well as Firefox v2 & v3 and even Opera!

(Oh, and it’s XHTML and CSS3 compliant too!)

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Anyone who has seen code written by me that requires the invoking of WinForm controls will know that I have an irrational hatred of the “recommended” way of resolving cross-thread operations.

Now, whilst I agree that cross-thread operations should be handled correctly, and I’m actually glad Microsoft decided to tighten its belt over this when it came to creating the dotNet framework, it just seems very “bloaty” to have to write methods such as the following:
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I had the pleasure of upgrading the OS on our sales director’s new notebook today.
(It was shipped with XP Home, which is useless for business work.)

After discovering that the “USB CD-ROM drive” we apparently had in the store-room was infact firewire, and as such totally useless for my purposes, I had to find another way of getting XP Pro installed.

From experience, I know you can run many flavours of Linux straight from a USB memory stick, as long as the computer’s BIOS natively supports USB flash disks. But I’ve never seen or tried to do the same with Windows XP.

After a morning’s worth of trying different ideas and different memory sticks, I was finally greeted by the warm blue installation screen of the Windows XP operating system.
Below is a quick step guide of how I achieved it:
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