Perry Stathopoulos

Microsoft has released a new version of the SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer tool. The tool is from a Database Administrator’s (DBA) perspective and not from an architect nor developer’s perspective.

Check it out here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=da0531e4-e94c-4991-82fa-f0e3fbd05e63&displaylang=en

There is a lot buzz about the Semantic Web. The possibilities that it offers are very exciting. The following is great intro video to answer the question, what is it, and what can it do for me?

Great news! As promised, the .NET Framework source code in Visual Studio 2008 is now available for debugging. Detail instructions and FAQ is available on Shawn Burke’s blog here.

Note, for users of 64bit edition, there is an extra manually step to do in the QFE fix.

The assemblies available for source viewing are:

• Mscorlib.DLL
• System.DLL
• System.Data.DLL
• System.Drawing.DLL
• System.Web.DLL
• System.Web.Extensions.DLL
• System.Windows.Forms.DLL
• System.XML.DLL
• WPF (UIAutomation*.dll, System.Windows.DLL, System.Printing.DLL, System.Speech.DLL, WindowsBase.DLL, WindowsFormsIntegration.DLL, Presentation*.dll, some others)
• Microsoft.VisualBasic.DLL

I recently came across a fairly good set of links all related to LINQ:

http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/archive/2006/10/05/Links-to-LINQ.aspx

With LINQ become more predominate every day, eventually some important will be asked as developers need to adopt new and different ways of accessing data repositories.

I recently came across a great (and detailed) FAQ that is sure to answer most questions.

http://blogs.msdn.com/dsimmons/pages/entity-framework-faq.aspx

I certainly answered my question, but not with the answer I was hoping for :(. Automatic mapping between Enums and a column in a table is not supported.

http://blogs.msdn.com/dsimmons/pages/entity-framework-faq.aspx#_Does_the_EDM/EF

I hope they rethink this as that kind of simplicity is what increases adoption of new technologies. It’s  one the things that convinced me to start using NHibernate. Even LINQ to SQL supports automatic enum mapping.

Sourcegear is offering DiffMerge for free! Kudo’s for also making it cross-platform.

The product offers diff, merge, and folder diff.

I’ve been using FreeCommander for a while now. It’s a nice file manager that is lightwieght and fast. It also supports two windows side-by-side and multiple tabs in each window. Pretty cool.

I highly recommend it.

I recently came across an interesting looking program by StarInix called Free Database Compare 2.0. The great thing is that is support Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL.