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Today Johan van Zyl relayed a Node.js offer email in comp.lang.clarion. This is a promotional offer which is designed to get you signed up on a $29/month plan at Learnable.com. The first month is just $9 and you get the Node.js course and ebook. I haven't had any experience with Learnable yet, and it's probably well worth the $$$, but do note that you can cancel any time if you just want to drop the $9.

I've gone ahead and signed up for the $9 offer. I've done some work with Node.js but I'd definitely like to learn more. If you haven't played with it yet, I suggest you take a look. From the Nodejs.org web site:

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

There are lots of cool things you can do with Node.js - I've mainly experimented with it in conjunction with DocPad to create lightweight web sites. 

Here's the offer text:

Are you doomed if you're not already developing for the web and/or mobile devices? Possibly. Here are a few things to keep in mind. 

Lee White points out a recent blog post savaging MySQL for various flaws. The comments are also interesting reading. 

Mark Riffey recently mentioned Telerik's Icenium, a cloud-based development tool for both iOS and Android development that leverages JavaScript and HTML5. There's a desktop IDE for Windows developers and a browser-based UI for other platforms. Your code lives in the cloud (Rackspace, reportedly). Apps are distributed through their respective app stores. 

Icenium uses Telerik's Kendo UI, which lets you use one code base and create native user interfaces on multiple platforms. There's also something called LiveSync, which makes it possible to have multiple different test devices running and all syncing in real time to changes made via the development environment. 

Check out this review.

Lee White points out this blog post on creating your own network attached storage (NAS) box. Steve Streza (technology, design, and bacon lover) explains how he went about creating an 11 terabyte storage server based on the FreeNAS operating system (a variant of FreeBSD). The blog post contains detailed instructions and a parts list with a total cost of materials of just under $1500. The system uses six drives and can tolerate failure on up to two drives at a time. 

While running VS 2012 today I finally hit the wall on that ridiculous all capitals main menu, which surely has to rank with Microsoft Bob as one of Redmond's worst UI moments. 

Happily, I found this post by Richard Banks on how to restore sanity (i.e. mixed case) to the main menu. 

In case that post goes offline, all you need to do is add this DWord registry entry (line break added):

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\
VisualStudio\11.0\General\SuppressUppercaseConversion

with a value of 1 and then restart VS 2012. 

Ah, sanity!

Dennis Evans points out this free book from RedGate on backing up and restoring SQL Server databases. Yes, this 391 page PDF includes information on RedGate's own SQL Backup Pro (plus there's a free trial version of that product) but there's also a lot of generally useful information on backing and and restoring databases. 

Microsoft has announced BUILD 2012, its annual developer conference which this year will be held at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington from Oct 20 to Nov 2. Registration opens August 8. You can view the 2011 presentations at Channel 9.

Unfortunately the chosen date is a direct conflict with DevConnections in Las Vegas. 

Mark Riffey brought Mighty Moose to my attention, which led me to a few other products that similarly compile your .NET code while you type, and run any affected unit tests so you get immediate feedback on how your changes affect your code base. This is pretty cool stuff. 

I've put up a couple of quick pages on Microsoft's Reactive Extensions (Rx) and Paul Betts' ReactiveUI, two libraries that are generating a lot of interest in the .NET world. 

Michael Dettmer has posted some information on the CodeCharge web development tool, which he points out has a lot of features that make it similar to Clarion and WinDev. Generated code can be in ASP.NET (C#), ASP, PHP, Java Servlets, JSP, ColdFusion or Perl.

While looking at ways to manage database changes that happen as a result of application upgrades, Dave Harms comes across SQL Server's snapshot capabilities. There are some issues to be aware of, but if you need to roll back a database change, snapshots can help you do it in a hurry.