Another MacBook Pro Owner

I picked up my Intel Mac last week.  It will soon replace the Mac mini I bought in February 2005, and the Dell PC I bought a couple of years before that.  It’s the first laptop I’ve had that wasn’t issued to me by an employer.  So far, I think I’m going to be very happy with it.

The first impromptu performance test was this: can the MacBook Pro handle simultaneous installations of Windows XP Pro (in Parallels for Mac) and World of Warcraft (direct to the Mac)?  The answer turned out to be yes, even with over a gigabyte worth of WoW upgrades (and nearly 80 patches to Windows XP Pro, not including SP2).

The next items on the the to-do list for setting it up are these:

  • Install most of the stuff described here
  • Transfer data from the Mac mini
  • Install Microsoft Office 2003 on the Windows XP virtual machine

Sometime after this, I’ll attempt to install Visual Studio 2005 in the virtual machine and see how it works.

Resetting passwords with .NET membership provider

Say you have a user with no password question and answer. It turns out that calling ResetPassword() on that user will throw an exception. There’s an overload that takes password answer as a parameter, which also throws an exception if the wrong answer is provided.

The way to get around this issue for me turned out to be changing “requiresQuestionAndAnswer” to “false” in the membership provider configuration.

GUID vs. Identity Column for Primary Keys

From the time I started using databases (Sybase 10, Microsoft SQL Server 6.5), I’d always used identity columns for primary keys in tables.  So when I came to my current employer and saw GUIDs all over the place, I wondered if that wasn’t overkill.

I did a bit of searching on the issues, and came up with these links:

The authors of these pieces can reasonably be described as pro-GUID.  They are up-front about the drawbacks of their preferred option (performance is a big one).  I tried the tip on using NewSequentialId() instead of NewId() (from Jeff Atwood) , but SQL Server Management Studio kept giving me errors when I attempted to update the default value of a table column to use it.

Unit testing framework for BizTalk solutions

I didn’t know such a thing existed before today, but thanks to a couple of consultants in my office, now I do. The cleverly-named BizUnit is available at codeplex.

The information on this project indicates no dependencies on any existing unit-testing frameworks (NUnit, MbUnit, etc).  Having not used BizUnit, I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad either way.