So, Linq to SQL is awesome, but I have never really much cared for Entity Framework.

At work, we are moving to using WCF Data Services for our database access, and using Entity Framework since configuring WCF Data Services to use linq to sql is about as pleasant as punching yourself in the face...3 or 4 thousand times.

So, today I needed to add a view, a simple thing really that did bascially 'select distinct somecolumn from table where somecolumn is not null'. I drag and dropped it on the design..8 times. It never actually took.

After some discovery, I notice that down in the bowels somewhere it was gently telling me there was a problem, but not really telling me what. Interestingly if you open the edmx in notepad, you will notice it added my view, except it commented it out  stating the view 'does not have a primary key defined and no valid primary key could be inferred'.

Awesomely there isn't any way to tell it that column is the inferred private key, can we move on. Instead, I end up following an article on MSDN telling me how to manually edit the edmx file to add about 4 thousand new things to get it to recognize it and let me use it.

Of course I then had to add another table later, so I had to redo it all again.

Humorously, the MSDN article says 'modify your database schema so that each table has a primary key or so that one or more columns of each table or view is non-nullable or non-binary', which I tried, the view had distinct, non null, where is not null etc all in there, but it refused to work by conventional means.

It is no wonder to me why Microsoft has so much trouble trying to kill off linq to sql when EF is such a drama queen, and so often.

So, I posted before my happiness (sic) that Microsoft is basically retiring Windows Home Server in favor of pushing Small Business Server Essentials, and I had made up my mind to pretty much stay on Home Server v1 until the end of time.

Well, my normal A.D.D kicked in and I formatted my server at the house, installed SBS Essentials 2011 and moved about 5 TBs of data across the network.

Windows Update rebooted the machine during the copy, so, well, I copied 5 TBs of data across the network again.

With Home Server gone, I no longer have Drive Extender to seemlessly duplicate my data across multiple drives, and shares are now limited to the size of one drive. To get my movies on one 'drive' I end up spanning a pair of drives together. And to get backups, I know have to set them up manually. I set up a couple drives to store server backups and go to configure my backups.

Now, I wasn't looking to back up the whole drive, just a very small couple of folders off of it, but I don't even get the option to drill into it. So not only have they screwed us out of the convienence of drive extender, now I can't even manually do what was built in before.

That doesn't even cover the fact I don't get Sharepoint or Hyper-V in Essentials. Positive spin, I have found there are a lot of great free options for virtualization out there right now!

I am off to download the sync toys to set up some file replication to get backups going. I have been a HUGE Microsoft fan for a really long time, but I have to say, they are making it hard to drink the Koolaid anymore.

As someone who has used ASPNIX for at least 5 years (I have emails for this domain while hosted there dating back to 2007, but based on the content I would guess I had already been with them for 2 years or more), I figured I would provide a bit of feedback and a general feel from my experience there.

First things first, if you are one of the people I referred there, my apologies. I know things are fine for some of you, and some of you cancelled a long time ago. I would have moved a long time ago as well, but I just use my hosting to mess around and uptime isn't all that big of a deal.

So, for performance/availability:

When things are going well, things work great. Servers are fast and responsive, especially considering the price point. The problem is, when things are not going well, things tend to fall apart and stay apart for way too long. And customer service was always less than helpful in those situation from my experience. They either seemed to be unable to provide any information, or would plain deny the problem.

Mail: Anyone who has been with them for more than the last 6 months will know the story with the email server there. This thing was down a ridiculous amount of time for something as relied upon as email (even considering the price point) and when I would contact support, they would act like this was the first time it was down in forever. When they finally migrated/replace/fixed the server, the scheduled down time was 3 hours. IIRC, it took well over 48 hours to resolve. Or I should say, it took 48 hours to get it back online. For the next month or two, it still went down regularly, and again, when I would contact support, they would act like this was the first time it has been down since the upgrade.

SQL: I have to say, I don't think I have ever seen their SQL Sever down. The performance has been great etc. Top notch here.

Websites: Hit or miss. Seemed like it was either running great or really struggling. I had way more downtime than I would have like, but like I mentioned earlier, I wasn't real concerned about it (lazy).

I almost cancelled a couple years ago, and had actually moved my blog to self hosting at my house and blogged about my frustration with ASPNIX then, but self hosting is typically pretty drama filled when you do it on a residential connection, so out of laziness again, I ended up moving it back up to ASPNIX when they got the webserver uptime issues I was seeing at the time sorted.

Support/Customer Service: This has been the big issue for me. I don't think I have had a single positive experience with ASPNIX since day one in the customer service arena.

Long story short, they reached out to me a couple weeks ago and told me they weren't going to be supporting .net 4.0 on the server I was on and I needed to be moved to a server with their new fangled control panel software. You know me, I love change. 

Now remember, this scenario comes in to play because I have been a customer with them long enough they are retiring the Helm platform I am on.

I ftped everything down and sent them an email that I was ready to move. The replied was that the move would mean deleting my domains from the old control panel and rebuilding them on the new. In that process that meant that I would lose all of my email accounts, and emails...unless I wanted to pay them. Per domain.

So wait, they are having me move servers, after years of paying for hosting and they wanted to charge me money to move to what any new customer would get for free out of the box.

We went back and forth literally for days, and yes, it would have been easier to just pay, but as we let more and more companies treat us with disrespect, more and more companies will notice they can. (yes, I am also looking at you Charter, but that is a story for another day).

So, much immaturity on both sides, and they basically lost mostly free residual income that had lasted for 6+ years, and would have lasted probably for the rest of my life (again my laziness) over about 30 bucks.

So, yeah...anyhow, moving on.

<update>I went to leave feedback on their Customer Feedback and Reviews forum, following the rules in the sticky that feedback needed to be constructive. I was polute and specific in my issues, and when I posted, was informed that forum is moderated. My post didn't show up. I guess that is why all of the posts in that area are either positive or are concerns with Roma addressing them with specific answers. People with real grievances are just censored. I really should have left there a long time ago, I hate giving people like that my money.</update>