F$#% SQL Compact

Not a very professional post title, I know.

I would write a poem about it,

but I hate it too much for that.

Really though, SQL Compact provided the majority of the issues on a project I worked on recently. The good news is that I would say I am more qualified to use it now than I was before and know exactly how long much longer to estimate a project out to be when it is going to be involved in some way. The answer is: 42.*

For anyone who is going to use it: It's more limited than you think. Just expect to do all your normal SQL scripting in the business logic for your project. Hell, the best way I found to do something quickly was to use Entity Framework and use the Entity Data Model Wizard to create an .edmx file. Then, include this in your project and write all your batch scripting directly as LINQ statements.

I need to see if someone has create an interpreter that will run a Transact-SQL script on a SQL CE database. If not, it should be created by me or someone else. If you're that someone else, I love you.

* ...hours of annoyance. This is quite possibly the amount of time you will spend outside of the work environment cursing the day it was conceived. 

RE: Area of Focus: C# and HTML5 / Belated Job News

Well, this is the first post I've made in ages. Around the time I started this this blog I had just started my first professional coding job which left less than than I had hoped for updating it. Now that I've been settled in for a while I'm going to do my best to update this again more frequently. I need a place to pursue personal programming tasks and projects anyway.

That being said, I can confidently say now that my 'Areas of Focus' for C# and HTML 5 have been fulfilled. I use C# on a daily basis at work and do modern web design nearly as often. I'm actually creating a clone of an old Windows 3.x game that I used to love as we speak. I'll make sure to provide a link to it as soon as I make a bit more progress. My current goal is for that to be by the end of this weekend however we will see how well that works out this being Easter weekend and all.

I have made some progress this weekend though having already ripped, by hand, all of the graphics from the original game. I converted them to transparent PNGs which should work well I just have to remember to put them in a single sprite sheet if possible so that the number of requests is reduced. This should allow for a much quicker load time. Realistically though there aren't very many sprites and additionally they came from an era where the entire screen resolution consisted of 640x480 pixels or even less so each PNG is like 500 bytes. So, the question is: is it better to have a single request for of the composite sprite sheet or a bunch of requests for the smaller individual sprites? I guess one benefit of the latter is that your browser can do multiple requests at a time allowing for parallel downloading.

Anyway, I'll update this as progress occurs...