Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

Tomorrow begins my final week as a W2 employee. As of Monday, February 27th I become an independent contractor!

While doing some T-SQL coding today against a SQL2K server I noticed a very frustrating issue: The xp_sprintf system stored procedure fails if the variable you send it to receive the formatted string is not long enough to hold the entire string. However, it doesn't tell you it fails. It just sets the string to a NULL and returns zero (Success). The @@ERROR server variable is also zero.

Our local user group meeting is tomorrow and we've got some good ASP.NET topics.

Why does this happen? I spend at least two hours reducing a problem in some company's reporting engine down to a very manageable piece of sample code that can be run by anyone -- no database connection required (everything is done from XML datasets that are embedded in the sample). It's easy. It reproduces the problem. It's a great starting point for tech support.

Want a free copy of VS2005? Check out the "Launch Tour 2005" site:

If you're in the Detroit, Michigan area, please take a moment and fill out a survey created by our local .NET user group. We (the board members of GANG) want to know what's working, what isn't working and any ideas you may have for change. Even if you don't currently attend the meetings, please fill the survey out and let us know why. Thanks!

If you're in the southeast Michigan area you'll want to make sure you come to the GANG meeting on September 21st. Not only do we have a couple of great speakers (Josh Holmes and Tim Landgrave) talking about a hot topic (web services), but we've got a free copy of Visual Studio 2003 we're giving away! Everyone that shows up gets a chance to win. And if you bring a friend you'll double your chances! Don't miss it.

You're being a good developer and running your class library code through FxCop to see how well your code is following Microsoft's .NET Framework Design Guidelines. You've got a pretty harmless section of code like this: