March 2006 Archives

March 31, 2006 • Vol.28 Issue 13
Page(s) 25 in print issue

As some of you know, I live within artillery range of the main Microsoft campus. That’s a term my dad (a former Army artillery and air-defense officer) would use when he wanted to keep the city elders in El Paso, Texas, aware that his home overlooked the city and he could easily lob a few rounds of 105mm artillery down on city hall if they strayed from their elected duties. The relationship I have with the folks on campus is not quite that strained but gets pushed to the limit from time to time.

March 18, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 11
Page(s) 20 in print issue

With apologies to the other William, this is the question many Visual Basic 6.0 developers are asking as they migrate to .NET. Should they transition to Visual Basic .NET or retool and switch to C#? It's clear that those of us that like, nay love, Visual Basic are troubled as we see more desertions from our ranks.

March 17, 2006 • Vol.28 Issue 11
Page(s) 26 in print issue

Lately I’ve been pounding away on the CLR chapters of my new book “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server (7th Edition).” Before starting the CLR chapter, I wanted to poll the current state of the industry to see what they think about using Visual Basic .NET or C# (or one of the other CLR languages) to create an SQL Server 2005 stored procedure, function, user-defined type, trigger, or aggregate.

While I was invited to VSLive Orlando and DevTeach Montreal this year, I was forced to turn down these kind invitations. I am taking time off to speak at SQL/Visual Studio Connections in Orlando the week of April 4th. I'll also be passing through the Kansas City .NET user group on the way to give a talk on ADO.NET “Connecting“.  I'm also giving a talk at TechEd in Boston and I hope to visit user groups out there if invited.

 I'm focusing very heavily on my new book “Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server (7th Edition)”. For the last month or so I've been focusing on the SQL Server CLR Executables chapter that has grown to over 90 pages so far. I've discovered a wealth of un and under documented features and issues that once discovered will make developing CLR stored procedures, functions, user-defined types, aggregates and triggers a lot easier. I also include a section on leveraging these executables from other applications--where it's possible.

Next on the agenda is the Visual Studio ReportViewer control and the reporting features of Visual Studio 2005.

Peter Blackburn and I hope to have the first draft done in the next couple of months and published by this summer. So far we have over 600 pages and we're still going strong.

Thanks for waiting.

Please report any problems posting to this blog. I have some pretty tight anti-spam tests in place that might have prevented some legitimate posts from being accepted. Generally, if your post contains more than two links, it's rejected. This approach was taken as the spammers invariably list a long list of links in their garbage posts. I also reject or delete posts that extole the virtues of President Cleveland--those simply can't be tolerated. 

Generally, I don't like to answer 1:1 technical questions--I simply don't have the bandwidth. I do lurk on the public newsgroups and the MSDN forums which are good resources for free advice. I don't charge any more to answer questions on the forums than I do for questions sent via email, but you have a lot better chance of getting through my junk mail filters.

If you have comments that are not accepted, please feel free to email them to me. I will be happy to post them--whether or not I agree with the comments. My email address is --be sure to put “Comments on blog subject <subject>” in the subject line.

Thanks