Virtual Labs enable you to quickly evaluate and test Microsoft's newest products and technologies through a series of guided, hands-on labs that you can complete in 90 minutes or less. There is no complex setup or installation required, and you can use...

You can find the details here : http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2012/01/26/join-us-march-7-2012-for-the-virtual-launch-of-sql-server-2012.aspx

If you hit to the 65.536 rows limitation in Excel (97-2000) XLS file format, we have good news :) As you know the 65.536 rows limit in an Excel sheet has been removed with Office 2007/2010 with the new Excel format XLSX. But SQL Server Reporting Services...

Our Principal Group Program Manager Raghu Ram make an announcement about "Microsoft SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux" in http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jdbcteam/archive/2011/10/13/announcing-microsoft-sql-server-odbc-driver-for-linux.aspx

Please refer to our SQL Server Escalation Services blog post for details : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2011/10/03/yes-we-made-a-mistake-and-are-finally-going-to-fix-it.aspx

If you've read my previous blog post " Accessing Excel files on a x64 machine " and you loved our ACE OLEDB Provider, I want to let you know that we released " Access Database Engine 2010 Service Pack 1 ". This update is also available in Windows Update...

If you've compiled/re-compiled an ADO application on a Windows 7 Service Pack 1-based computer and the app does not run on down-level operating systems with the any of the error messages below, please see our new KB article published today (16th of March...

Our RTM build number of .NET Framework 4.0 is 4.0.30319. 1 . After appyling "Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1" to your Visual Studio 2010, you will see that some DLLs in your .NET 4.0 upgraded from 4.0.30319. 1 to 4.0.30319. 225 . For example check...

Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is available for download. MSDN subscribers can download the bits now. General availability will be on Thursday, March 10. Here are the links : Download Service Pack 1 (MSDN Subscribers) Thursday's general...

You're wondering ore maybe you've already using "SQL Azure" but still have questions on your mind and don't know where to start. Here's a good resource for you. You can find our wiki about SQL Azure here . I'm pretty sure that you will like it if you...

Our KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815112 clearly states this. Then, you may ask me "Why this guy is repeating the documented thing in this blog post ?". Answer is simple, we do see lots of issues coming from our customers about this and I...

Though this CTP release is released on 14th of January, 2011, I noticed that I forgot adding my blog. In case if you haven't noticed that it's available already and want to "play" with the 4.0 CTP please download it from here . This technology preview...

In Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2010 , you've started developing your Data project and let's say you're designing your DataSet s through Visual Studio's nice DataSet Designer just by drag/dropping your entities (tables, views) into the designer...

In your SSIS packages, if you need to read from or write to Oracle likely that you most probably hit some Oracle Client related configuration issues. ORACLE_HOME, PATH environmental variables etc. Sometimes you may see a machine needs to run SSIS packages...

Registration is now open for TechEd Middle East 2011. Tech·Ed is Microsoft’s premier technical education event providing the most comprehensive technical training on Microsoft’s suite of products, technologies, solutions and services...

On 17th of September 2010, we released a Microsoft Security Advisory about a security vulnerability in ASP.NET. This vulnerability exists in all versions of ASP.NET. This vulnerability was publically disclosed late Friday at a security conference....

As you know an SSIS package is an XML content regardless if you're storing your SSIS package in file system (as a .dtsx file) or storing your SSIS package in MSDB (then your XML content inserted into sysdtspackages or sysdtspackages90 tables in MSDB)...

In the old times while all the CPUs were 32bit, we were happily using JET OLEDB Provider reaching Excel or MDB files for long time without any issues. After we started using x64 CPUs and x64 Windows machines, we noticed that JET OLEDB Provider is not...

I haven't touched much about debugging but I admit that sometimes you have no other chance than analyzing a post-mortem dump or live dump to troubleshoot a problem. Our "Debugging Tools for Windows" package comes with a very hand VBScript : "adplus.vbs...

Our SQL Server JDBC Driver 3.0 is released recently. If you're coming to SQL Server from Java, make sure that you're using our newest JDBC Driver : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a737000d-68d0-4531-b65d-da0f2a735707&displaylang...

Why the breakpoints that I set in my "Script Task" (not "Script Component" in the Data Flow *) never hits ? On a Windows 2008 x64 machine, you're running SQL Server 2008 x64. Let's say you added a single "Script Task"; you wrote a very simple MessageBox...

The Visual Studio is the primal IDE for developping .NET applications. Especially its debugging features makes it more powerful. One of those feature is the “Visualizer”s. Visualizers are UI components to show the content of some complex objects...

When you read the title, I'm pretty sure that you asked "Why do I need to do this web service consuming things in a Script Task although I can use ready-to-use Web Service Task ?". Well... I faced issues for some scenarios that you will need to consume...

One of our customers was saying that their SSIS Project with some complex "Data Flow Task"s with lots of Lookup Transformations was opening very slowly in BIDS ("Business Intelligence Development Studio") or I don't know if I should say "Visual Studio...

One of our customers had reported that when they tried installing a decent Microsoft XML related patch from a Microsoft Security Bulletin, it was not allowing them to use the usual command line switches like "/norestart" "/quiet" etc. on some of their...