Found quite a cool thing recently, that means you can have optional parameters in a SQL stored procedure.
This means you can pass the options into the procedure if you have some, or if none are passed get the SP to use some defaults instead. It took a while to get the syntax correct, but its fairly straight forward, in this example we will use the year and month as optional parameters:

@year int = NULL, @month char(20) = NULL
AS

if ISNULL (@year, 0) = 0
begin
SELECT @month = DATENAME(month, GETDATE())
SELECT @year = DATENAME(year, GETDATE())
end

First of all we declare the 2 variables, then we check if the first one is NULL (nothing passed). If it is then we set both the month and year to be the current month and year. Simple but effective!

I have another article published at aspfree.com, this one is about creating a simple RSS feed using ASP.net, written in c#. Read it HERE

This week i’m doing a Cisco CIND course. And on the first day, joy of joys i’ve been doing subnetting. For those who don’t know this means working out the subnet masks and host address ranges for various numbers of subnets or hosts.
Its been a long time since I did any of this and it’s no easer than the last time I did it. Why is it less complex to work it out using binary than doing it the easy way using decimals? I think I might just be scared of numbers bigger than 1!

Even though getting my head round some of the maths is tricky, I still think ill get a lot out of the course (most of the Microsoft ones I’ve done tend to be a bit lacking in practical information), but why is one of the first things the tutors ask is ‘are you taking the exam?’ Are they all on commission from the vendors? I’ve never seen the point in taking an exam that will be irrelevant or not recognised by anyone within a couple of years. I suppose it looks good on a cv, but I don’t think it makes up for real world knowledge.

There is a new Beta version of the OpenSource, Linux based firewall available now from http://smoothwall.org/.

I’ve been a user of SmoothWall for quite a few years, and this new update looks promising, as its still in beta i’m not really willing to blow my existing firewall away just yet, but ill definitely be upgrading when the production version is released.

A couple of days ago I wrote about Windows Live! writer, I decided to download it today and this post is being written from within it. It does look nicer than the last version, and its support for tags and images is a great improvement. Ill find out in a minute if the formatting stuffs up when I upload it to blogger, that was why I stopped using the last one.

Don’t know if you have ever used it, but Microsoft wrote a bit of software called Windows Live! Writer (why does half of the products they bring out have Live! in the title?). There’s another version (beta 2) that’s been released. Read more about it at http://jcheng.wordpress.com/2007/05/30/finally-writer-beta-2/

I did download the first one, it worked ok but lacked a couple of features, and when I uploaded the postings some of the formatting didn’t look correct on Blogger. I might try the new one and see if its any better.

I have got another article up on AspFree.com, its about logging terminal server connections and you can read it in all its glory here

On a completely different topic, if you like a bit of English alt rock music, check out the Pigeon Detectives first album Wait For Me. It’s rather good