Covalentia Community Portal Goes Online

Finally! It’s up and running, and I’d really like to apologize to my fellow programmers for any inconvenience caused.

On another note, I’m going to upload a new release candidate, Covalentia Version 2.1 RC 1 by today or tomorrow. This release will have a slightly new look and contain the source codes for the Covalentia.Core project. I shall discuss the details later. So, stay tuned ;)

DRAGON

That's the name of our server :)

Perhaps, LAME is more appropriate. I'm thinking of adding more RAM to it, say another 256 or 512 MB, if I can find one in the unused Red Hat machine.

Server Reinstallation

The Covalentia community portal will be offline for a few more days because the lame server is currently with me, and not at the data center. I’m backing-up all the files and reinstalling everything from scratch. Take a look at the specs (and try not to laugh):

• Clone PC – not a 1U Rack Server
• Some ASUS main board
• Pentium 4 1.7GHz
• Normal 40GB Hard Disk (Neither SCSI nor SATA and forget about Hot-swap & RAID)
• 512 MB of RAM
• Some 10/100 MB Ethernet PCI Card

So, now you know why we need fund :)

And the CodePlex site is down as well. Keep it comin'.

Next Release

There are quite a number of minor changes in the upcoming release of Covalentia Version 2.1. In the last few days, I’ve been working on code and database optimizations, naming convention, fixing bugs and GUIs. The new release will also include the source codes of Covalentia.Core project which contains the Data Access Layer and other core components. With the availability of these source codes, developers can see what’s really going on (or nothing’s going on) behind the curtains and perhaps learn a few things (or teach me if I did wrong) about System.Reflection which is heavily being used and how to avoid multiple expensive calls to this class using cache. And more importantly, it should give those greedy hackers less reason to get into our community server. I’ve given everything for FREE. I left nothing. I have nothing left ;)

Updates

• Removal of un-used methods and classes in both Covalentia and Covalentia.Core projects
• Upgrading Table and TableColumn Attributes and Attribute Handler classes, and Table Schema generation especially foreign key support, maximum data length, default value and supports for all possible data type
• New database support for PostgreSQL 8.1 and Oracle 10g (Partial)
• Optimizing and bug-fixing Query Generator class
• Microsoft SQL/MySQL database structure optimizations which include the following:
  • Making data as small as possible for example using smallint and mediumint integer types
  • Declaring columns to be not null
  • Declaring Foreign Keys, Constraints and Indexes
    It is important to note here that since the InnoDB in MySQL database rejects any INSERT or UPDATE operation that attempts to create a foreign key value in a child table without a matching candidate key value in the parent table, only non-zero (or not null) columns may be declared as Foreign Keys.
• Renaming classes and methods to follow Microsoft’s Naming Covention
• Placing C# codes in separate files (for Web Form & Web User Control files) to increase readability
• Using UpdateProgress (Microsoft AJAX) to avoid pages from freezing upon post-back, especially during switching Tabs and Sub-Tabs back and forth
• Applying styles, themes and skins
• Upgrading Tabs and Sub-Tabs for better performance and look
• Better documentations for codes, tooltips and help (partial – this is a lot of work)

To Dos

• Database supports for PostgreSQL 8.1 and Oracle 10g
• Microsoft AJAX 1.0
• A new release for Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition

As for our community server, our hope to bring it online last week was dashed. The server is infected with all kinds of spy-wares and ad-wares. We’re in the process of removing them and we’ll let you know once it’s stable. Somebody actually unplugged the firewall and chaos reigned for a while. It's a war. We eventually managed to put a stop to it but not without casualty on our side. But, we’ll continue to survive ;)

Upgrading Work

We are currently upgrading our server at Covalent Technology. Hence, the Covalentia community portal and other sites that we’re hosting will remain offline for a few days. We hope to bring it up as soon as we can. I suspect some virus attack and network card problem. In the past few weeks, we’re experiencing malicious hacking attempts, and perhaps one (or more) of these attempts had been successful. I really don’t see the reason why people would do such things to us. But, I do know a few why people would not. First of all, we’re not a multimillion company, and thus, these hackers will not profit from us because we won’t be able to hire them to boost up our server security. Second, we’re giving Covalentia for FREE along with the source codes. And finally, if these hackers would just ask us which part of Covalentia (or us) that they want, we’d be more than willing to give them so ;)

Just ask, you greedy bastards.

Lost Connection when Running MyISAM and InnoDB Databases Silmultaneously

A few weeks ago I posted this error I'm experiencing when running my .NET applications on Windows Server 2000 or XP on MySQL Forum. I’ve totally forgotten about it until today, and realize that someone from MySQL has actually replied to my posting. He suggested that I report a bug which I just did. If you encounter the same problem, perhaps you may want to keep track the bug here.

If you don't believe me, try out some of my previous applications running MyISAM databases. After a while, you'll get the error. And there's nothing wrong with my applications, trust me. It's a MySQL bug :)