Brian Ritchie

No web portal is complete without a Dilbert comic strip! Scott Adams provides a daily dilbert comic on Dilbert.com.  This strip is made available by eSynaps through a web service.  The only problem with this approach is to integrate it into your web site requires code.  For example, hooking this into my SharePoint portal is a problem.  So I created this small web project to server up the image directly through a HttpHandler and cache it for better performance.  Enjoy!

I'm not sure of the value of this, but it was sure fun!  Here is a screen shot of Mono running on RedHat Linux running in a Virtual PC session on Windows XP Pro. To take it to the next level, I accessed ASP.NET pages servered by the Mono XSP server and ran a GTK# app through VNC back on my Windows XP session!  I hope you enjoy the screen shot. (sorry, the ASP.NET part isn't shown)

If you need the ByteFX MySQL Provider compiled for .NET Framework 1.0, download it here.  I compiled version 0.76 under .NET 1.0 since you can only download this release compiled for 1.1 from the project page.

I just posted a new release of SharpDbSchema. Check it out, the web-based schema browser is my favorite new goody.

I've been reading about the new additions coming in ADO.NET 2.0.  One of them is a “Provider Factory” (DbProviderFactory) interface for creating connections in a more abstract fashion.  To read about how it works:

ADO.NET is missing an extensible architecture for accessing database schema information.  While there are ways to get this information using the OLE provider, or importing the old ADO COM libraries, there doesn't seem to be a pure managed code method.

Hopefully, the new SharpDBSchema library changes this.  It is designed using a provider pattern which will allow each database provider to implement a method for collecting schema information.  The initial version includes the basic interfaces, factory-based provider creation using a configuration file, and a MS SQL Server schema provider.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

My home page is now .NET powered @ www.dotnetpowered.com!  It has projects I've been working on as well as .NET resources.

Mono Beta 1 has been released. See the Release Notes, or go directly to the download page.