Bush Fever

There is “George Bush fever” in the air in Canberra today. People are doing crazy things just to get a glimpse of “the most powerful man in the world”. What would make hundreds of people stand out in the cold at ten o’clock at night just to see a darkened limo drive past? I don’t know. Maybe people in Canberra are bored and have nothing better to do? Perhaps. But it’s been 12 years since an American President has been in town so people are bound to be a little curious!

Well, the protestors are gathering, the FA-18 Hornets have not stopped buzzing overhead since he arrived and the police are everywhere. It’s feels like Bush has woken Canberra from a deep sleep!

Aggregator

I have changed from RSS Bandit to SharpReader. For some reason, some of my rss feeds were not being updated in Rss Bandit. I was also having problems with the FeedList XML file when Rss Bandit was re-opened. SharpReader – so far so good.

Connection Pooling

I have just spent a day looking into why my ASP.NET application was running out of connections:

“Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to obtaining a connection from the pool. This may have occurred because all pooled connections were in use and max pool size was reached.”

Once I reset IIS, the connections were freed and the application started functioning properly again. But this was only a temporary fix. Obviously connections were being orphaned instead of being returned to the pool. After some analysis of my source code, I found that there were quite a few SqlDataReader objects that were not being closed after use. Unlike a DataSet that is “disconnected”, the SqlDataReader must maintain a connection to the database until it is explicity closed by calling the Close() method. I meticulously went through every method to ensure no SqlDataReaders were left open. This fixed the problem. I found that the connections were then pooled correctly.

Moral of the storey: Always Close() your SqlDataReaders!

Point of Interest: If a SqlDataReader is set as the DataSource of a control and Control.DataBind() is called, the SqlDataReader is automatically closed.

Connection Pooling

I have just spent a day looking into why my ASP.NET application was running out of connections:

“Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to obtaining a connection from the pool. This may have occurred because all pooled connections were in use and max pool size was reached.”

Once I reset IIS, the connections were freed and the application started functioning properly again. But this was only a temporary fix. Obviously connections were being orphaned instead of being returned to the pool. After some analysis of my source code, I found that there were quite a few SqlDataReader objects that were not being closed after use. Unlike a DataSet that is “disconnected”, the SqlDataReader must maintain a connection to the database until it is explicity closed by calling the Close() method. I meticulously went through every method to ensure no SqlDataReaders were left open. This fixed the problem. I found that the connections were then pooled correctly.

Moral of the storey: Always Close() your SqlDataReaders!

Point of Interest: If a SqlDataReader is set as the DataSource of a control and Control.DataBind() is called, the SqlDataReader is automatically closed.

Rss Take 2

I am now using the RSSify page at VoidStar to generate an Rss feed for my site. Should i change to movable type? Should I wait for Google/Blogger to get their act together and offer Rss generation for free? Only time will tell…

Short Holiday

Sharon and I are off to Melbourne for the long weekend.
Enjoy!