Woohoo Microsoft

This is probably not going to interest many people on the site and it will show how much of a geek I am. Visual Studio 2008 service pack 1 came out today. Also .NET 3.5 SP1 came out. This also includes SQL Server Compact Edition service pack 1.

I have a really good reason to be happy about it though. At work we've been moving from Visual Basic 6.0 (yuck!) to C#, .NET 3.5, WPF. To help learn this newer technology quicker I've come up with a project to do at home. One thing I want to do is take an old 50s wood radio and make it a modern mp3 jukebox. I want to find something like the following where I don't have to change the outside. I can put a touchscreen in place of the turntable.

There's jukebox software out there already, but I am going to make my own. I don't learn well by just reading a book. I need a project, a reason to use the stuff. This projectis perfect and will have stuff that is analogous to the business world.

So, why I am excited about these service packs. There's something with SQL Server Compact that has been annoying me, it had no TOP command. I am using SQL Server Compact because then I don't have to install anything extra. It's part of .NET 3.5. Yeah, it's limitted but I am not making a business application. I just need to keep track of songs. It's a simple database. What TOP does is limit the amount of data that is returned. Sometimes you don't need everything. I have such a case.

Take a look at the following screenshot. I am working on how to do the song selection. The following screenshot show the albums in order of artists. I only have one database table which stores all the songs. To make that screenshot I ask for the unique artist/album combinations from that table. Basically in return I get a list of all the albums, no song information. However, to get the cover art I need to get it from one of the mp3s. Before the service pack there was no way to ask for a single song that matches the album and artist. Currently I just take the first song in the list that is returned and use that mp3 to get the cover art. However, returning all of those songs takes up memory and extra processing cycles. Now with TOP being supported I can have the database return only the first song (Top 1) instead of all the songs in the album. With today's computers you won't see a difference in a small change like this. But I think most of today's programmers have become lazy. Doing a bunch of small improvements like this will affect the system as a whole.

(Click for actual size)

Interesting tidbit. The look and feel is programmed using WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). This is a new thing Microsoft is introducing. It;s what Vista's interface is programmed in. It's vector based which basically means it will look the same at any resolution. That window is 800x600 but the contents are in a 640x480 box that is being stretched. doesn;t looked stretched, does it? That's vector graphics for you.