I will be transitioning to a role outside Microsoft starting in October but intend to keep blogging in the future about topics of interest around software development, SQL Server spatial and other technology and entrepreneurship topics. My new blog...

I will be attending the www.com-geo.org conference in Washington DC in a couple weeks and it promises to be a pretty interesting conference, bringing together many of the major players in GeoSpatial (Public and Private Sector, ISVs, Academia). I'm attending...

Good afternoon, The SQL Server team is currently undertaking a short survey to learn more about the information you need from a database development and administration tool about your databases once they are "up and running". Please take a few minutes...

I hope everyone had a great holiday and that Santa was good to you. My kids made out like troopers this year with the grandparents buying them a Wii. Yes I know I work for Microsoft -- but we already have an XBOX 360 – actually we have 2 of them but...

You can find a recording of the session Ed, Torsten and I gave at PDC on building location-aware applications using the SQL Server Spatial Library here: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/SVR33 Have a great weekend, Olivier

Good Evening, I sit down to write this blog article on the plane on my way to LA in preparation for tomorrow’s presentation at PDC on the same subject. In my last article I described the ability to leverage the hard work that the SQL Server team put...

I will be presenting at PDC next week with Ed Katibah and Torsten Grabs on uses of the SQL Server Spatial library (SQLTypes). The session will be on Tuesday at 12:30pm. Title: Building Location Aware Applications with the SQL Server Spatial Library...

In my previous blog post I discussed the ability to leverage the SQL Server type library in your own .NET applications. The article showed how to create a simple console application that calculates some areas for different shapes and how to create these...

In SQL Server 2008 we introduced the ability to store spatial objects as columns within a database through the Geometry and Geography types as well as the ability to perform efficient query operations against those columns through the use of a new Spatial...

The Microsoft SQL Server product team is undertaking a short survey to help guide potential new features and capabilities for web developers, please take a few minutes to take the survey and help shape the future of SQL Server. Click this link to take...

It has been way too long since I’ve blogged. I have no (good) excuse. I had the opportunity to attend and present at last week’s Tech-Ed conference and had a great time meeting customers and getting feedback and suggestions on SQL server and our developer...

Just a quick post to wish folks a happy new year. Next week will mark my first year at Microsoft. While I still need to work on my resolutions for 2009 (healthy eating, exercise,... you know the stuff that usually only lasts a week or so), I do have...

Good Afternoon, I’ve just completed posting the WiE community project to CodePlex. As this is my first CodePlex project I expect that I may have forgotten some steps so please let me know of any issues you experience and I will work to resolve them...

Just a quick post to let you know that you can now access and download the WiE Powerpoint presentation from the PASS Summit 2008 web site. http://www.softconference.com/pass/sessionDetail.asp?SID=135520 I believe SQLPass will also post the actual...

In the previous article we covered using the use of INSERT triggers along with the new Spatial data-type support in SQL Server 2008 to implement “spatial rules” for our location-based service. All that remained was to implement a mechanism to make all...

In this second to last chapter in the series I’ll discuss leveraging SQL Server 2008’s support for spatial data types to implement the “spatial rules” for the WiE Community. Specifically, this article will implement 2 examples of simple proximity rules...

In the previous article of this series I mentioned that we would next discuss how to visualize the GPS information we’ve been collecting and storing in SSDS. This article looks at using Virtual Earth to visualize the location history for members. For...

Good morning, It has been much too long since I last wrote to the blog. Things here have been busy, but that's no excuse. I hope to get back on track with writing regularly to the blog. I will be continuing the series on the WiE community and will...

The Implementation of WiEModelWithLocalCache As we discussed in the previous articles, the data layer for the WiE Mobile Client is made up of “providers” that each implement the IWiEModel interface and work together to implement support for the occasionally...

The Implementation of WiERemoteModelSSDSForMobile The WiERemoteModel expects to store and retrieve data from SQL Server Data Services (SSDS). I won’t include the entire implementation of the WiERemoteModelSSDSForMobile in-line as we plan to eventually...

In the first article in this series I introduced the concept for the WiE Community, a mobile and location aware social networking community. In last week's article we covered the high level architecture and the design for the WiE Mobile Client. In this...

In last week ’s article I introduced the WiE Community project I have started working on. WiE is a location-based social networking community built to demonstrate an end to end application built on top of SQL Server Compact, SQL Server Data Services and...

Before joining Microsoft I had started my own company to market a software as a service offering to the specialty trade contractor segment of the construction industry. Our service was called JIM (Job Intelligence Manager) and was a mobile project management...

Good Afternoon, While we strive to make SQL Server the easiest and most efficient database to manage, we will likely always have some gaps with each release. Frankly, that's where 3rd party tool vendors and partners have a unique ability to help DBAs...

I returned from TechEd IT Pro Week with a lot of feedback from our customers, everyone seemed genuinely excited about the SQL Server 2008 release. While I spent most of my time at the booth last week fielding questions from DBAs and system administrators...