Recently in Announcements Category

Progressive Business and Beta V have partnered together to present another series of technical webinars. The current series focuses on SQL Server and Reporting Services and consists of six 90-minute talks given two a day for three days. The next scheduled offerings are September 9-11, October 13-15 and November 2-5th. See the following link for an outline and pricing details. Note that this series includes a copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server (7th Edition) as well as a copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services—once we get them from the publisher…

Visual Studio, SQL Server & Reporting Services: 6 High Impact Training Sessions
This is a set of 6 seminars given in two parts—one that focuses on SQL Server, the second on Reporting Services. This high-impact series of training webinars is for anyone who wants to leverage Visual Studio, SQL Server and Reporting Services best practices—learning what works, what doesn't and why. These sessions are for developers, architects and managers who want to know how and (more importantly) when to leverage the power and benefits of SQL Server and Reporting Services.

I’m currently prepping the content for a series of six 75-minute lectures on SQL Server and Reporting Services for Progressive Business Technology. Instead of having to leave the office, get on a plane and fly to a conference, these webinars give developers the opportunity to get quality content right from the office or from home. These lectures might be the key factor that makes you a better developer or candidate for that new job. Consider that a single paid attendee can include any number of co-workers on the same call, watching the same content over the Internet. You’ll also get a chance to ask questions in real time (as time permits). Unlike previous sessions, this workshop includes a copy of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services” and “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server (7th Edition)”

I’ve been invited to speak at the Best Practices Conference in Washington, DC (my home town) August 24-26th. This year Brian Moran has added an entire track of SQL Server sessions that focus on what developers need to know to best leverage the power and flexibility of SQL Server. We’ll focus on the “why” rather than the “how” some approach should be taken. This conference is ideal for developers, architects, managers and their staff. I’ll be joining a long list of MVPs as well as Microsoft team members as well as industry executives and authors to provide a great set of relevant content. I hope to see you there…

I’m scheduled to give another in a series of webinars on May 13th. This one’s on SQL Server Common Language Runtime (CLR) executables. It’s sponsored by Progressive Management Audio Conferences so you’ll have to pay the fee ($199) to get in. See their website to get access to the feed.

I’m giving a webinar on SQL Server Stored Procedures Thursday morning (March 12th) at 1 PM Eastern time. This 70-minute session discusses how to write efficient stored procedures and call them from ADO.NET.

The materials and précis can be downloaded from here… http://www.pbconferences.com/8Y/9W

Bill Ramos announced in his blog that there is a new version of the (required) tool to manage SQL Server databases. It’s free and ready to be downloaded. Check out the Microsoft Download site.

Early in March the MVPs are holding their annual summit on the Redmond campus. They want us to provide questions to be posed to the Microsoft managers who want to hear what the developer community thinks.

Please feel free to comment. I’ll pass on your comments to the folks on the hill.

• What progress has been made to better communicate between the various divisions at Microsoft? Case in point (one of many): The new Local Data Cache has two separate mechanisms to create and initialize the class. This means that the same properties are exposed differently by the two tools (one is a wizard, the other a designer). Another point: Why is there such a difference between the functionality exposed by the Visual Studio Server Explorer and the SQL Server Management Studio Object explorer? For years (decades) we’ve seen a chasm between the data teams and the Visual Studio/Languages teams as they struggle over features and functionality. As a result we’ve seen repeated cases of duplicated efforts and different interfaces/explorers/tools that expose most of the same stuff.
• Why was basic functionality removed from Visual Studio or not included when the technology evolved? For example, when Visual Studio 2005 shipped we lost the ability to drop a stored procedure on a form and generate a class that included a populated Parameters collection. This was not replaced in 2008. When Visual Studio 2005 shipped, there was no support at all for existing BI projects. This did not arrive until Visual Studio 2008 SP1. When the new ReportViewer control was released for VS2008 SP1 the ability to use the RDL generated by the BI tools was left off.
• What emphasis has been placed on addressing the long list of issues that I and others have raised over the years. We keep hearing about how resources are tight but schedules keep getting shorter as release cycles are shortened but there seems to be more than enough time to introduce new, complex features for the largest IT organizations.
• Why has the emphasis shifted from the small-to-medium sized shop supporting 1 to 25 developers to large IT shops that support hundreds of developers per project? Doesn’t Microsoft realize that the bulk of VB6 customers were in this area? Does Microsoft really think inventing yet another language or development paradigm will win back these disenfranchised customers?
• Why does Microsoft seem to think it needs to “productize” development tools and push their development teams so hard so that needed functionality is left behind? By shortening the release cycle Microsoft makes it nearly impossible for adequate documentation to ship with the product. For example, look at the help topics that ship with the newest technology—too many of the topics are clearly machine-generated placeholders that were never filled in. Independent book authors and publishers cannot afford to pick up the slack with this degree of churn. When you make your product obsolete in 18 months, you kill book and training sales and the incentive to document the missing pieces not to mention the developers who have to constantly retool.