Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2

Microsoft has opened up the second beta for Internet Explorer 8

Some new features are :
- Accelerators : Select some text and a new Icon pops up, allowing you to search it with Google, mail it, ...
- Search bar improvements : Sizable, and it can show the first result for seaches on eg. wikipedia
- Web Slices
- Stability : Crash recovery and each tab has its own thread, so crashes should close only one tab.
- Tab groups : When opening a link from a tab, both tabs will get a color, indicating at a glance which tabs belong together.
- Inprivate Browsing (a.k.a. the porno modus) : When activated IE will not remember any cookies, or leave traces from the sites you have visited.
- And more (click here for the tour)

I installed it on vista, and it seemed a little faster (maybe my perception). Tabs groups seems very nice and useful. The first look is very nice, better than IE7, but I guess it will not yet replace my Opera :)

You can download the beta :
Here for XP
Here for Server 2003
Here for 64 bit XP/Server 2003
Here for 32 bit Vista/Server 2008
Here for 64 bit Vista/Server 2008

Enjoy :)

Hug a Developer Today

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Linq To SQL Stored Procedure returns an Int

Today I was using Linq To Sql to execute a stored procedure wicht returned results by using a temporary table and dynamic sql (not my stored procedure)
Suprisingly enough when I dropped the procedure on the dbml file,
it generated a function with the return value typed as integer.
As it turned out, linq to sql and temporary tables don't play nice.
And since the database was a sql 2000 db, using table variables was not possible.

The solution turned out to be simple enough,
replace the stored procedure with a dummy one that returns the fields your normal procedure will return (names and type).
Then drop this stored procedure on the dbml file.
This will generate the correct return type for your procedure,
then simple alter the stored procedure to the correct one.

Hurrah, we can now use linq to sql to use our difficult stored procedure.