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.
Continue reading "Common Language Runtime Executables: Another Look" »
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.
January 20, 2006 • Vol.28 Issue 3
Page(s) 24 in print issue
As a developer and author, I find myself constantly researching new technology. Ostensibly, my readers (mostly other developers) are doing the same. The problem is that the information available is all too often overwhelming—even for the experts. Incidentally, all of us are experts on something. Some know every aspect of getting an aging lawnmower to start; others (supposedly) know how to build an effective antiballistic missile defense system (although IMHO there are too many “experts” in this field). But I digress.
January 6, 2006 • Vol.28 Issue 1
Page(s) 23 in print issue
Starting the New Year right means making (and hopefully keeping) resolutions that will make us better people (or perhaps just thinner). I think about how I can be a better person all the time but I (like others, I suspect) don’t have the willpower to alter my self-destructive behavior enough to stop eating burgers.
November 11, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 45
Page(s) 25 in print issue
I had a private chat with Steve Ballmer during the MVP summit in late Septemberalong with about 2,000 other MVPs. He opened up the floor to questions, and he (bravely) took my question. I wanted to know what steps Microsoft was taking to clean up the trash flowing into my (and everyone else’s) computer each and every day. It’s gotten to the point that I get over 200 chunks of spam every day.
November 25, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 47
Page(s) 23 in print issue
I just read Mr. Sixto Ortiz Jr.’s article, “Is Outsourcing Overhyped?," in the Oct. 28 issue with some interest. It's a subject near and dear to the hearts of developers here in the United States (and I dare say Canada) and probably closely watched by offshore developers in Whoknowswhereistan.
October 28, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 43
Page(s) 23 in print issue
This week I gave a couple of sessions and a day-long ADO.NET workshop at VSLive in Orlando. These trips give me a chance to get away from the office and out into the real world. I find it essential to hear about the problems faced by developers working with the old, the new, the borrowed, and the blown technologies. Along the way I eat and visit with as many different groups of people as possible, as well as network with the other speakers. We trade stories and solutions and try to get a better understanding of what we should be telling our customers.
September 30, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 39
Page(s) 23 in print issue
For the past several weeks I’ve been working on the “Getting Started With ADO.NET” chapter of my book. Because there are so many developers out there that have not made the transition to ADO.NET, I think it’s important to get these folks started out on the right foot. Based on the volume of questions in the newsgroups, it’s clear that more and more companies are (finally) migrating to .NET. I’ve stopped lurking on the ADO classic groups as their questions all seem the same and for the most part have already been answered.
Continue reading "Playing With Matches & Running With Scissors" »
September 16, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 37
Page(s) 24 in print issue
There’s nothing like the devastation that is caused by a disaster such as Hurricane Katrina to make us all aware how brittle our IT and infrastructure systems are. While I don’t understand how the engineers in charge of the levees failed to recognize the need for pumps that would work during and after a big (really big) storm, I expect that’s something that has taught everyone a lessonalbeit a bit late.
September 2, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 35
Page(s) 23 in print issue
I'm still heads-down working on the next edition of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005." It's slow going, and it's been hot here in Redmond. My office is like an ovenover 90 degrees. When my P4 3.2GHz system's processor reached 171 degrees, I decided to install a liquid-cooled CPU heatsink before solder started dripping off the motherboard. The new cooling system, which includes a pump, fish-tank hoses, and an external heat exchanger, dropped the CPU to a balmy 136 degrees. It’s also kind of sexy. The pump and heat-block glow an iridescent green. All I need now are those clear plastic cabinet covers, but I digress. . . .
August 5, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 31
Page(s) 23 in print issue
I am still working on the next Hitchhiker’s Guide, so I thought I’d share a bit of the “Building Commands” chapter. Another motivation to focus on the Command object again (I visited it this time last year) is the alarming number of developers who are still rolling their own ad hoc queries. That is, they’re using concatenated queriesinserting parameters into the WHERE clause (and other unmentionable places). This practice makes it far easier to inject nasty SQL in places where it ought not be.
July 8, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 27
Page(s) 21 in print issue
One of the questions I was asked at the DevTeach conference, which was held in Montreal the week of June 18, concerned placement of business logic in stored procedures. People asked, “Is this the proper place?” I told them a rather long story about when I worked for the Department of Public Safety in Austin in the ’70s.
May 27, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 21
Page(s) 22 in print issue
As promised, I want to talk about a rather interesting concept that Microsoft’s SQL Server team is introducing. Although this approach might never see the light of day (we still don’t have a firm ship date for SQL Server 2005), it needs to be addressed before it is cast in concreteif it’s not too late already.
Continue reading "SQL Express Edition: Isolating Users From Themselves" »
April 29, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 17
Page(s) 22 in print issue
I lost another hard drive last weekthat makes two this month. It makes me realize that hard disks (nay, any kind of mechanical media) have a limited lifetime. As disks get larger, the amount of information at risk grows, as does the difficulty of finding some way to save what’s important. What I really need is a wife who can double as an IT manager, so I don’t have to worry about keeping my systems working smoothly and the data backed up and safe.
Continue reading "Backing Up, Restoring & Rolling The Dice" »
April 1, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 13
Page(s) 23 in print issue
Peter Blackburn and I spent the week of March 14 at a Microsoft-sponsored author/publisher conference in Redmond learning more about how Microsoft plans to implement Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005. We heard Jon Roskill and several other Microsoft product managers hint about when they expect Whidbey and Yukon to ship. I was with Microsoft long enough to know that until we get a bit closer to the date, any estimate on release to manufacturers has to be taken with a grain of salt.
Continue reading "What’s Going On At Microsoft For Developers?" »
March 4, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 9
Page(s) 21 in print issue
My Microsoft wireless router now paperweight went south for the winter. Because its range was about as far as I could throw it in the living room, I decided to upgrade to a router-bridge rig that could get me better connectivity. My house is pretty ordinary by U.S. standards—wood frame and not much that would block the 2.5GHz signal. I had already switched away from my Siemens 2.5GHz two-line phone system because it (according to Siemens) "used up" the entire band (and then some). I replaced it with a Uniden 5.8GHz phone that theoretically wouldn't fight as much with the wireless 802.11 network.
February 18, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 7
I've been working more closely with the new Visual Studio 2005 (aka Whidbey) as I built my sessions for the VSLive talks in San Francisco (Feb. 6-10) and the Connections conference in Orlando (March 19-23). (See www.betav.com for details.) As usual, my focus has been on data access and how it integrates with SQL Server 2005 (Yukon).
January 7, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 1
Page(s) 22 in print issue
There is nothing that makes me feel older than a few days with my grandkids. My daughter and her children (Mary, 4, and Katie, 18 months) came for the holidays. They just left, and the house has returned to the deafening quiet that I seem to enjoy. Now I don't have to carefully navigate through the 4,000 plastic toys like a soldier feeling his way through a minefield at night in his bare feet.
February 4, 2005 • Vol.27 Issue 5
Page(s) 21 in print issue
This week has been spent getting my Christmas present (to me) working. You would think that installing a faster Intel processor on an Intel motherboard would be fairly easy. It wasn't.
December 24, 2004 • Vol.26 Issue 52
Page(s) 22 in print issue
I spent the middle part of November traveling and speaking, first in Las Vegas at the SQL Server Magazine-sponsored Connections conference and then at the VBUG conference held in Reading, United Kingdom. Peter Blackburn and his wife were kind enough to host me for a few days, and they treated me to a trip to the Lake District. Except for a few (dozen) scary moments on some (very) narrow icy roads at night (at breakneck speeds), the trip was fun, and we were able to catch up on a number of issues regarding our new book.
December 10, 2004 • Vol.26 Issue 50
Page(s) 21 in print issue
Peter Blackburn and I gave a seminar recently on Reporting Services to an oil company in Louisiana. No, we didn't have to fly down to the bayou country; we simply set up a VPN and hosted a NetMeeting session. It was a lot cheaper than spending two or three days standing in lines, sitting in cramped seats, and sleeping in strange beds to give a two-hour talk. The company in question was very pleased but shocked as we pointed out some of the security gaps in Reporting Services. Apparently, most people who train them try to sell them something. Peter and I weren't really trying to sell a product (other than a few copies of our book). We were trying to make their experience with Reporting Services successful and, most of all, safe.
November 12, 2004 • Vol.26 Issue 46
Page(s) 20 in print issue
While trolling the newsgroups this week, I came across a sad, but not that atypical, story. A consultant was asked to convert a functioning SQL Server (MSDE) database application to use JET. In his post, he said not to bother trying to convince him that this was a terrible idea. I didn't even bother to respond: He was beyond my help.