Have you heard about extension methods yet? If you have then you probably know exactly what the title of this blog means. I can see this becoming one of the most asked about exceptions in the coming release. At least until the dust settles. <Edit>...

There are not a lot of guidelines about blogging, the one that I like to adhere to is that I only blog about bits that you can go and play with. This ends up creating gaps in my blogging history as I move to new unpublished products. I have moved, oh...

One of the biggest changes you may not have noticed in the v1.1 2005 JDBC driver is that we have changed the default isolation level for Distributed Transactions from Serializable to Read Committed. This is in line with other JDBC drivers like our 2000...

I have gotten some questions about using Sql Server 2005 with the 2005 JDBC driver. There are unfortunately a lot of misconceptions in this area. Here are some notes to make this a little bit easier to understand. The first thing you need to understand...

The v1.1 2005 JDBC driver is now available for download here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/ref/jdbc/ This is a release I am personally really proud of, and we could not have done it without you! Maybe it’s the fact that not that many...

Announcing the June 2006 Community Tech Preview of the JDBC 2005 driver: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=f914793a-6fb4-475f-9537-b8fcb776befd&displaylang=en This preview contains all the changes of CTP 1 including...

When you get down to it Customer feedback is what makes a project like this interesting and worthwhile. This is the first project I have worked in where the Product Feedback Center has made such an important difference and a BIG thank you to those of...

To use the Type 2 Integrated Security feature with the v1.1 CTP (if you don't have this already make sure to get it! see my previous blog) you only need to make sure that the Windows authentication DLL is visible to the application that is going to use...

I am proud to say that the first community preview release of the SQL Server 2005 JDBC v1.1 driver is now available. This build includes Type-2 integrated authentication for Windows XP and Windows 2003 clients (windows 2000 client support to come in...

Sql Express is going to be a good match for the Sql Server 2005 JDBC provider, it is free, it is relatively easy to set up and deploy and it has all the power of Sql Server 2005 for low end applications. There are a few things to keep in mind when...

As you have probably seen by now we have shipped beta 2 of the Sql Server 2005 JDBC driver. http://www.microsoft.com/sql/downloads/2005/jdbc.mspx We have put a lot of work into this beta and it is with some trepidation that I see it go out the...

If you had told me a year ago that I would be working on a JDBC driver I would have honestly thought you were kidding. If you had suggested a ship date concurrent with Sql Server 2005 (within a reasonable window) I would have laughed out loud. This is...

One of the hardest things for me this last few months was to go into “radio silence” over the project I am currently working on. Now that we have officially shipped a beta I can come back to blogging, albeit from a slightly different angle. Microsoft...

It is a fair assumption that you have not heard about DataWorks, that is ok most folks arround Microsoft haven't either. MDAC on the other hand probably sounds familiar... DataWorks is the Microsoft Product Unit in which I work, it is responsable for...

As with most of my blog posts this started as a customer question, the core of the problem was that he was not sure how he was expected to use TransactionScopes in methods that call other methods or "downlevel" functions as he named them. There are two...

Mars session pooling, Well, it has been a long time since my last blog and I am finding it very hard to get this one started. You start thinking that you need to have something really good to start up the train again or you might as well not bother. I...

Well, it has been a long time since my last blog and it is going to be a while before I get going again. Whenever this happens you can count on me being either insanely behind or on vacation. I am happy to report that the insanely behind part is over...

Creating a connection object at the start of the process and passing it versus relying on connection pooling and the “using” construct? This seems to be a hot topic in the adonet newsgroup, I would like to put in my two cents. This post deals with the...

I am a big fan of pop quiz style blogs like the ones you can find here: http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/ . I am not really sure that there are enough people looking at this blog to make this fun but I am going to give it a try. I will incorporate the answer...

This blog talks about behavior in the SqlClient and the Oracle managed provider exclusively. One of the biggest problems with pooling before ado.net 2.0 has to be the fact that we did not know how to handle the pool when the server went down. Let me describe...

I became involved in the Side by Side and compatibility work items after making the mistake of voicing the fact that I did not like these scenarios. Life can laugh at you that way well enough on it’s own, but in Microsoft a comment like that is like playing...

I find that we have not done a good job of explaining the “knobs” used to tweak the managed connection pool (the one used by SqlClient and OracleClient), the worst knob definitely has to be the “Connection Lifetime” keyword. First of all, the name is...

"File or assembly name ‘<udtname>’, Version=1.2.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=389619d4c1235f8a', or one of its dependencies, was not found." If you have started using Sql Server 2005 User Defined Types it is likely that you have run into...

ADO.NET 2.0 Multiple Active Resut Sets per connection in Sql Server 2005 (MARS) FAQ Q: What is MARS? A: MARS is a new feature in ado.net 2.0 and Sql Server 2005 that allows for multiple forward only read only result sets. EDIT There is a great article...

ADO.NET 2.0 Asynchronous Command Execution (ASYNC) FAQ (DISCLAIMER: Based on Whidbey beta1 and subject to change) Before going into the Q&A below I would highly recommend reading Pablo’s excellent Async article located here: http://msdn.microsoft...