April 28, 2006 • Vol.28 Issue 17
Page(s) 25 in print issue
I spent the last week in March in Leavenworth, Kan. I was speaking at the Kansas City, Mo., .NET User Group. They had a great turnout and made me feel very welcome. I gave my Hitchhiker’s Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server “Connecting” talk, which seemed to be very well-received.
April 14, 2006 • Vol.28 Issue 15
Page(s) 25 in print issue
I attended the chapter meeting of the Vietnam Helicopter Pilot’s Association this afternoon. We were given a talk from a member of the current generation of wartime helicopter pilots—an Army captain just back from a tour in Afghanistan. His presentation included a number of photographs shot in combat and during a wide variety of situations, some quite familiar to the 50 or so Vietnam helicopter pilots in the room.
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.
February 17, 2006 • Vol.28 Issue 7
Page(s) 23 in print issue
I was lurking on one of the newsgroups recently where one of the longer threads raised a number of interesting issues. The gist of the thread focused on several incidents reported by a number of independent consultants—one of whom was hired to extricate a major corporation from a serious SQL Server performance problem. We’ll call him “Fred.”
February 3, 2006 • Vol.28 Issue 5
Page(s) 25 in print issue
Application developers are a proud bunch. Like proud parents, they’re convinced that their latest creation is the solution to the world’s problems—or at least deserves as much attention.
