Visual Studio Data : Miscellaneous

SQL Server Everywhere Edition announced

MilindLele — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 21:58:00 GMT

Paul Flessner announced the new addition to the SQL Server family. This will provide a lightweight storage on all clients and will include support for seamlessly synchronizing with other SQL Server editions.

Milind Lele

Awesome Jim Gray video (by yag)

YAG — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 22:02:00 GMT

Jim Gray was interviewed for Behind The Code back in early March. Jim's a Technical Fellow here at Microsoft and manages our Bay Area Research Center. For data folks like me, he is one of the people that came up with the theories that underly transaction processing in databases - and he works on scaleable servers with things like Terraserver today.

They cover his entire life and career - from growing up in Italy thru Tandem and DEC to Microsoft. He's even joined by someone with whom I've shared a number of airplane rides recently - Tom Barclay.

I've had this on my "to do" list for a while, and actually had the free hour to watch the video today. I'm just sorry I didn't do it earlier. Highly recommended.

Ken goes Live! (by yag)

YAG — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 07:32:00 GMT

Had to borrow the title from Andrew. Ken Levy, our VFP Product Manager is moving on to a Product Planning position in Windows Live. It's been awesome working with him these past few years. For those who don't know, Ken used to work with me at my own company, Flash Creative Management, around 10 years back, and it was a lot of fun doing it again.

I know he's going to do an awesome job with this new responsibility - and I'm pretty sure that 10 years from now, we're going to end up working together again <g> - that's just the way he and I seem to work...

Just wanted to wish you the best, buddy - and I'll still catch you for movies...

Four part paper on generics in VS 2005 (by yag)

YAG — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 16:49:00 GMT

Juval Lowy (who I'll be seeing tomorrow at the launch - did I mention we're launching Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and Biztalk Server 2006) tomorrow? <g>) has a four part, 107 page paper on generics in C#, VB and MC++ that has been published on MSDN.

SSEUtil RTM version is now available (by yag)

YAG — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 06:55:00 GMT

For all you developers who love the command line, or want an easy way to perform simple administration functions on SQL Server 2005, you can now download the SQL Server Express Utility. Among its capabilities, you can:

Connect to the main instance or user-instance of SQL Server.
Create/Attach/Detach/List databases on the server.
Upgrade database files to match the version of the server.
Execute SQL statements via the console (similar to SQLCMD) or the console window (UI).
List the instances of SQL Server on the local machine or on remote machines.
Log all input/output.

and more! One hint - it works with more than just SQL Express. It will work with SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 as well.

Tragic News (by yag)

YAG — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 17:27:00 GMT

I got an email today that an old friend and a long time VFP MVP, Drew Speedie and his son Brent died on Friday while hiking in Yellowstone Park. Drew and I spent many years speaking at the same conferences all around the world – and he was one of the speakers that could invariably find something new and interesting to discuss in his sessions. His son, Brent, came to many of the conferences, and I remember him proofreading conferences reports written at European conferences for the Universal Thread.

Our entire team offers our condolences to Drew’s family. They’ll be missed.

UPDATE: We just got this information from Russ Swall at Drew's company:

We have built a memorial site for Drew and Brent. We will continue to add information as it becomes available. It also includes a forum and some photos. If you have pix you'd like to share, please send me an e-mail with a link to them or we can arrange to put your photos on that site.

http://drewspeediememorial.visionpace.com/

Thanks to all who have contributed their experiences and condolences. We will be passing them along to Irene when she returns to Scottsdale.

I'm back - and an XML Editor tip (by yag)

YAG — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 20:40:00 GMT

It's been way too long since I've blogged. I was off on a family trip in Europe for 3 weeks, and wrapped that with customer meetings the week before and after. It's taken a while to get back into the swing of things - but here I am.

I thought I'd start off with a little XML Editor tip that came up the other day. We got a question based on Ken's Channel9 video on the XML tools that asked why the XML Editor would reformat a Word doc that had been saved as XML.

The answer is that Word documents insert an xml:space="preserve" on the root level XML element. That setting makes all whitespace (including the lack thereof) significant - a change to the whitespace could break the semantics of the document. Our editor sees that and doesn't make the change that is needed to do the reformat.

If you are willing to do it (at your own risk), you can delete the xml:space="preserve" attribute. This may change the doc in Word, however, but if you're doing this just to learn more about XML and the tools in VS2005 (which this person was doing), it should be fine. Just don't save it back. <g>

One other note - to fine the xml:space="preserve" more easily, you can turn on word wrapping if you want by going to Tool/Options/TextEditor/XML in VS2005.

Cool Code Using VFP 9 (by John Koziol)

vsdata — Wed, 11 May 2005 06:51:00 GMT

(UPDATED) ... Whoops, wrong alias name used in the USE IN command. Repaired now <g>

So Richard Stanton, part of the VFP Dev team and the author of all the great VFP Report enhancements in VFP 9, and I were going over a very cool algorithm. I can't get into what it does as we haven't decided what to do with it, but it's slick.

You know what I mean by slick, right? In my experience, developers will ooh-and-ahh at great algorithms regardless of how useful they are. If the code is elegant we get a warm-and-fuzzy feeling. I have a pet theory that this asthetic appreciation gets developers into trouble sometime - we love th code so much we refuse to see it may not be the right solution.

So Richard mentioned an old project of his to convert Arabic numbers (our standard numbers) into Roman numbers. I thought about it, and replied that I thought I could do it in 30 lines of code or less, not including any setup code like asking for the number or creating data structures that can be re-used. He sort of challenged me on that, and here's the result. Kinda cool but with very little real-world usefulness (heh). Sorry about the formatting.

* Arabic to Roman ... John Koziol May 10, 2005

* Public domain: Share and enjoy.

cNum=INPUTBOX("Enter a number between 1 and 3999","Enter number")

nVal=VAL(cNum)

IF !BETWEEN(nVal,1,3999)

=MESSAGEBOX("Can't even follow simple instructions?, Well begone!","Input Issue",16)

RETURN

ENDIF

DO MakeCTable

SET DECIMALS TO 0

USE AToRoman IN 0 ORDER main ALIAS ct

SELECT ct

cRoman = ""

FOR i = 3 TO 0 STEP -1

nAdd=10^i

nChrs=INT(nVal/nAdd)

SEEK nAdd

IF i#3

cRoman=cRoman+ICASE(nChrs=9,ct.nona,;

BETWEEN(nChrs,5,8),ct.penta+REPLICATE(ct.symb,nChrs-5),;

nChrs=4,ct.symb+ct.penta,;

REPLICATE(ct.symb,nChrs))

ELSE

cRoman=cRoman+REPLICATE(ct.symb,nChrs)

ENDIF

nVal=nVal- (nChrs* ct.narabic)

ENDFOR

USE IN ct

?cRoman

RETURN

FUNCTION MakeCTable

IF FILE("AToRoman.DBF")

RETURN

ENDIF

CREATE TABLE AToRoman(narabic N(4,0), symb C(1),penta C(1), nona C(2))

INSERT INTO AToRoman VALUES (1000,"M","","")

INSERT INTO AToRoman VALUES (100,"C","D","CM")

INSERT INTO AToRoman VALUES (10,"X","L","XC")

INSERT INTO AToRoman VALUES (1,"I","V","IX")

INDEX ON narabic TAG main

USE IN AToRoman

RETURN

More bloggy goodness (by yag)

vsdata — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 03:10:00 GMT

The C# team has a number of great blogs, and I've been after the VB team to be blogging more. So, I think I should point out a few of the new blogs starting up.

Paul Yuknewicz, VB PM, has a blog where he's discussing the release of VB 2005 Beta 2, a few new articles and one of the new starter kits. Paul just bought a boat - so go on over to his blog and ask him about it. <g>
The VB IDE team has a blog where they've started discussing their 10 favorite features.
I should have mentioned him earlier, but Brad McCabe is blogging up a storm. Brad has taken over the VB Dev Center from Duncan Mackenzie and is doing an awesome job.

Way to go folks! Hope the entries keep coming and we see even more...

Anonymous Comments Accepted Again (by John Koziol)

vsdata — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 23:20:00 GMT

For a while there, the bog wasn't accepting anonymous comments, that is, you had to register as a user at blogs.msdn.com. This has been changed and you can comment with or without an account.

Congrats to two Fox community sites (by yag)

vsdata — Sun, 10 Apr 2005 23:32:00 GMT

One of the cool things about Visual FoxPro is its community. I just wanted to congratulate two community sites for hitting great milestones:

PortalFox just hit its 20,000th user
The Universal Thread hit its one millionth message

It's great to see our community going so strongly!

New MSDN Forums for VS2005 (by yag)

vsdata — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 22:58:00 GMT

Those of you reading this blog for a while know that I'm very committed to improving our feedback loop here at Microsoft. In that spirit, I just wanted to give a congrats to the team that has just launched our new MSDN forums. Currently in use for VS2005, I hope that these get picked up by other teams over time (and yes, we're looking into it for Fox). The ease of a web interface, RSS feeds for tracking, IM or Email when your question gets answered, integration with the VS2005 shell, easy searching to lok for an answer to your question (something that I always found missing with newsgroups). I'm really excited by the possibilities...

Note - don't forget that if you find any bugs, you can report them as well. I was answering a question in the VB forum and had an issue with previewing and modifying my answer. As soon as this is posted, I'll be reporting that. <g>

Update: The one for Fox has been created!

Creating Tablet PC applications in VB (by yag)

vsdata — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 13:38:00 GMT

One of the things I showed when I was in India was various ways of ink-enabling your applications using VB.NET 2003. Now there's a new site, www.vbink.com, that focuses on just that. Pretty cool. (via Julia)

Dataworks team blog (by yag)

vsdata — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 17:31:00 GMT

One of the teams we work really closely with is Dataworks - they're the ones behind ADO.NET. They just started a team blog. First post is by their PUM, Alyssa. Welcome!

XML Visualizer for VS2003 (by yag)

vsdata — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 21:52:00 GMT

One of my favorite features coming in VS2005 is debugger visualizers. They allow you to easily add a type-specific form based visualization while debugging. Beth points to the XML Visualizer on GotDotNet. It lets you look at your dataset in a number of ways - the data, the XML, the schema. Pretty cool.

I can't wait to see what comes when writing tools like these get even easier in VS2005.