So I happen to love edit & continue in C# with Visual Studio 2005. There are people who say it encourages sloppy programming (which is true), but for me, there are some things I just can't code as effectively unless I know the runtime state. For example, writing complicated regular expressions against the results of various database queries and algorithms. Do I know if the regular expressions will work exactly before I run the code? No. Do I know if the code will work for all data permutations, beforehand? No.

Hence, edit & continue's blessing. Fire away, hit your asserts or whatnot, and if things look wrong, adjust on the fly. Now, I don't suggest doing big code restructuring while in edit & continue (could get messy & hard to manage), but you are able to if you need to.

Anyhow, much to my dismay I noticed that Edit & Continue stopped working after a while. I couldn't figure out what the deal was, since I was always getting "Changes are not allowed when the debugger has been attached to an already running process or the code being debugged is optimized" whenever I tried to edit the code while debugging. I also noticed that not all my variables were showing up in the Locals & Auto debug windows (this is a hint for the punch line).

Michael Freidgeim has a nice workaround if you get stuck and my simple solution doesn't help you.

His post didn't help, and it took me a few minutes to realize that my project was in "Release" mode instead of "Debug." Whooooops! I guess I didn't notice that because I was able to mostly debug, even in release mode. But I shoulda caught that. Anyhow, flipping back to Debug mode fixed the issue.

So after upgrading my XP Pro laptop to 2GB of RAM, I'm no longer able to hibernate it. Which stinks. I instead get the helpful "Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API" error. And no, having lots of free disk space doesn't do anything.

Apparently it's a known issue, with an unsupported hotfix that you have to get by calling Microsoft. Thankfully, Owen Cutajar's UGH post contains a link to download the fix. Let's see if it works...

Edit: Seems to work! :)

I was looking into ways to easily back up my local SQL Server database from the command line, and copy the resulting backup to my fileserver. That way I could kick off a backup manually or from a scheduled task. There are a few articles out there but they're more specific to SQL 2000 or earlier. Here's how to do it for SQL Server 2005.

I first made directory c:\sqlbackup and added a SQL script called backup.sql:

BACKUP DATABASE streamline TO DISK = 'c:\sqlbackup\streamline.bak' WITH INIT
GO
BACKUP LOG streamline TO DISK = 'c:\sqlbackup\streamline_log.bak' WITH INIT
GO

The above commands simply create log & database backups of the "streamline" database. I used the INIT parameter so that the backup files only create one version of the database (otherwise the backup files will grow & grow, containing every version of the database, each time you run a BACKUP command).

Then I made a simple batch file called backup.bat:

@echo off 
REM get today's date and time as one big string
for /f "tokens=2-4 delims=/ " %%i in ( 'date /t') do set theday=%%k%%i%%j
for /f "tokens=1-2 delims=: " %%i in ( 'time /t') do set thetime=%%i%%j
set now=%theday%%thetime%

REM create backup files
C:
cd "\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Binn"
sqlcmd -S localhost -U sa -P somepassword -i c:\sqlbackup\backup.sql -o c:\sqlbackup\log.txt

REM copy backup files to backup device
xcopy "C:\sqlbackup\*.*" \\10.1.10.50\ben_backup\sqlbackup\%now%\ /E /H /R 

The first section uses some DOS batch trickery to create a variable called %now% that contains the current day and time in the form of yyyymmddhhmm. The second section runs the backup script & writes the output to c:\sqlbackup\log.txt. The last section copies the all the backup files to my fileserver, inside a date & time specific folder. Notice how I used the %now% variable in the xcopy destination parameter.

Now my backup folder contains timestamped folders containing everything I need to restore my "streamline" database. You can use a similar technique to make file backups.