SQL Server User Education : help

SQL Server 2008 Books Online Documentation Refresh 9 Now Available

SQLServerUE — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:35:00 GMT

I am pleased to announce the availability of Documentation Refresh 9 (DR9) of SQL Server 2008 Books Online in the MSDN and TechNet Library. To see a list of the latest updates, please see the topic "New and Updated Topics in SQL Server 2008 Books Online (29 June 2009)".

As mentioned previously in this blog in the posting "SQL Server 2008 Books Online Release Cadence", updates to the SQL Server 2008 Books Online documentation set will be published montly to the MSDN/TechNet Library in English, and quarterly in the other supported languages.

Tai Yee
SQL Server User Education

SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 and Documentation Released

SQLServerUE — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 20:51:00 GMT

Hi everybody!

here is a new Christmas present for you all -- the release of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 (SP3), and supporting documentation, including:

SQL Server 2005 SP3 Download
Updated SQL Server 2005 Feature Pack
Updated SQL Server 2005 Books Online for download on the Microsoft Download Center
Updated SQL Server 2005 Books Online in the MSDN Library and TechNet Library
SQL Server 2005 SP3 Release Notes
SQL Server 2005 SP3 Readme

To see what is new in SP3, see the appropriately-tilted "What's New in SQL Server 2005 SP3" topic in Books Online.

Happy Holidays!

Tai Yee
SQL Server User Education

Social Bookmarking on MSDN and TechNet Now Available

SQLServerUE — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:46:00 GMT

Hey everybody,

MSDN and TechNet have now released their v1 of social bookmarking technology. This is very cool and will help you find SQL Server documentation and content much more easily, as well as share your bookmarks with others in the community. The MSDN social bookmark site is at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/ and the TechNet one is at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/. For all the details on this feature and how to use it to its maximum potential, read Chris Slemp's great blog post about it: http://blogs.msdn.com/cslemp/archive/2008/09/09/launched-social-bookmarking-v1-on-msdn-and-technet-video.aspx.

Tai Yee
SQL Server User Education

SQL Server 2008 Books Online Now Available

SQLServerUE — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:51:00 GMT

I am very pleased to announce that SQL Server 2008 Books Online is now available for download on the Microsoft Download Center in 11 languages.

The final version of the documentation is now currently being published to the MSDN Library and TechNet Library, and should appear at those locations soon.

To read more about the release of SQL Server 2008, read David Powell's blog post.

Tai Yee
SQL Server User Education

Annotating SQL Server Books Online

SQLServerUE — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:40:00 GMT

With Release Candidate (RC0) of SQL Server 2008, we have now enabled the Community Content feature on the SQL Server 2008 Books Online. This is the same feature that has been enabled on the SQL Server 2005 version of the documentation for about a year now.

While not intended as a means to ask questions and get answers (please use the Forums for that), if you want to add additional information, such as a sample, then by all means please do so!

Here is a really good blog posting from an MVP about how he uses the wiki and the value that can be derived from it: http://tfl09.blogspot.com/2008/06/msdn-wiki-1100-edits-later.html.

Tai Yee
SQL Server User Education

SQL Server Driver for PHP (May 2008) now released!

SQLServerUE — Fri, 30 May 2008 03:34:00 GMT

Hi everybody!

Just because we're very busy putting the finishing touches on the SQL Server 2008 documentation, doesn't mean that we stop releasing other things too! In fact, we just released the next Community Technology Preview (CTP) release of the SQL Server Driver for PHP. Documentation for this release is included in the package which you can download from the Microsoft Download Center. Or, you can also read the documentation online in the MSDN Library. To find out the latest updates and changes from the February CTP release, be sure to check out the What's New topic.

Tai Yee
SQL Server User Education

Tagging SQL Server documentation

SQLServerUE — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:26:00 GMT

If you've ever happened to find a SQL Server documentation topic that you were looking for and wanted to be able to come back to it later, you very likely have created a Favorite or Bookmark to it. But if you do that very frequently, your list of Favorites will end up growing very large and it may become difficult to find specific items. Did you know that you also have the option to Tag the Books Online topics in the MSDN or TechNet Library? For example, if you frequently use Transact-SQL topics in the Books Online, you can tag them with tsql or t-sql or whatever you like. Then you can easily find them later, without having to create lots of separate Favorites to individual topics.

As more people tag topics, and certain tags grow in popularity, they will be shown more prominently in the Tag Cloud. Currently, the Tag Cloud is shown at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/tags-cloud.aspx, and it is for all of MSDN content. MSDN is working on having separate Tag Cloud lists for individual content sets, so in the future there will be a separate Tag Cloud for just the SQL Server documentation. Also, currently only the SQL Server 2005 Books Online is enabled for tagging. The next release of the SQL Server 2008 Books Online will have this functionality enabled as well.

So in the meantime, tag up the SQL Server documentation to get it more prominent in the all-up MSDN Tag Cloud!

Tai Yee
SQL Server User Education

New SQL Server 2008 Scoped Search Macro

SQLServerUE — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:21:00 GMT

Awhile back, I wrote about a SQL Server 2005 Scoped Search Macro that uses Windows Live Search to help you narrow your search to just the SQL Server 2005 Books Online documentation and eliminate extranneous results from other sources.

Now, we have created a new scoped Search macro that does the same thing for the SQL Server 2008 Books Online documentation. You can find this new macro at http://search.live.com/macros/sql_server_user_education/sql2008bolsearch/.

As I am sure everybody has heard by now, SQL Server 2008 is the next release of SQL Server, which is due to be released this year. Currently SQL Server 2008 is available as a Community Technology Preview (CTP) release, and the Books Online CTP documentation is available both in MSDN Library online and for download at the Microsoft Download Center.

Tai Yee
SQL Server User Education

SQL Server 2008 February CTP Books Online Now Available

SQLServerUE — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 03:13:00 GMT

Hi everybody,

I realize it has been quite awhile since my last post, sorry about that. We on the SQL Server team have been very busy lately, with the joint SQL Server/Visual Studio/Windows Server Launch coming up next week. As part of that, we have been working on making improvements and updates to the CTP documentation that was released back in November. The February CTP update was released yesterday, so please download it and try it out! The English version of the SQL Server 2008 February CTP Books Online is available from the Microsoft Download Center at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=19db0b42-a5b2-456f-9c5c-f295cdd58d7a&DisplayLang=en.

To access other language versions, use the Change Language control on that page.

Thanks, and enjoy!

Tai Yee
SQL Server User Education

Please Give Feedback on Documentation

SQLServerUE — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 18:49:00 GMT

We rely on your feedback to help define and improve our documentation. Please feel free to send feedback to the documentation team regarding any of the following issues:

· When you feel a topic is particularly effective or ineffective and why you felt that way. We look at feedback on effective topics to continue doing the things that make them effective (for example, good examples, screenshots, etc.) and feedback on ineffective topics in order to improve them.

· When the topic doesn't reflect the product behavior (i.e. there's a bug in the documentation).

· When an important use case or scenario is not covered or more documentation or examples are needed.

We receive feedback both from topics that you view through the local help viewer and on topics that you view in the MSDN/TechNet Library. However, the way that you send feedback via each of these mechanisms differs:

To provide feedback from a topic in the local help viewer:

1. In the topic about which you want to provide feedback, click the Send Feedback link at the top right of the page, select a rating (optional), and click Send Feedback. This creates a feedback email using you default mail program.

2. Enter your feedback in the body of the email message. Do not alter the subject line.

3. Send the email message.

Note: Feedback from local help is not anonymous, so please let us know if you do not want to be contacted.

To provide feedback from a topic in the MSDN Library or TechNet Library

1. In the topic about which you want to provide feedback, move your mouse over the Click to Rate and Give Feedback link at the top right of the page, and then enter your feedback in displayed area. MSDN feedback is anonymous, so include your name and email address if are willing to be contacted in case we need more information from you.

2. Select a star rating based on your perception of the topic, with 5 stars as best and 1 star as worst.

3. Click Send.

You can send us feedback on any of our documentation sets in the MSDN Library:

· SQL Server 2008 Books Online

· SQL Server 2005 Books Online

· SQL Server Express Books Online

· SQL Server Compact 3.5 Books Online

· SQL Server Compact 3.1 Books Online

· SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver 1.1 Documentation

· ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 2 documentation

· Synchronization Services for ADO.NET documentation

Tai Yee

Microsoft SQL Server User Education

SQL Server 2005 Books Online (September 2007) Now Released in MSDN and TechNet Libraries

SQLServerUE — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 20:00:00 GMT

The Microsoft SQL Server documentation team is constantly updating and improving the SQL Server Books Online. Even while working on the next version of the documentation for SQL Server 2008, the team revises and releases updates to SQL Server 2005 topics based on customer feedback. We are now publishing the next update to the SQL Server 2005 Books Online: the September, 2007 update.

In the past, our processes for building the Books Online downloads have been faster than the processes for publishing the Web copies in the MSDN and TechNet Libraries. We therefore released the downloads before the Web versions were completed, and published the Web copies as soon as they were available. Because of recent changes in our Web publishing procedures, our time to publish to the Web is now faster than the time to build and test the Books Online download packages. We are publishing the September, 2007 Books Online update to the MSDN Library and TechNet Library* now. We will release downloadable versions of the SQL Server 2005 Books Online (September 2007) update on the Microsoft Download Center and Microsoft Update as soon as they become available.

* Note: The MSDN Library and TechNet library contain the same documentation set; the only difference between them is the branding (MSDN or TechNet) and what other products appear in the left navigation pane.

Tai Yee

Microsoft SQL Server User Education

Welcome to the SQL Server User Education Team Blog!

SQLServerUE — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:30:00 GMT

Welcome to the SQL Server User Education team blog. This blog is updated by members of the SQL Server documentation team. Our team is responsible for creating documentation that ships with Microsoft SQL Server (the SQL Server Books Online) and other Data Platform products such as the ADO.NET Entity Framework or Synchronization Services for ADO.NET.

The purpose of this blog is to:

Inform you about new documentation releases including new documentation sets, new releases of any of our existing documentation sets, new white papers, and so forth.
Share tips and tricks about ways that you can use documentation more effectively.
Take your comments and feedback regarding ways to improve our documentation.

We hope you find this blog useful -- please let us know what you think by Commenting!

Tai Yee
Microsoft SQL Server User Education