# Saturday, December 25, 2004
Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas

As I and my family take some time to celebrate Cristmas I would like to take the time to wish all of you a merry christmas. Whether you are a Christian and celebrate the birth of Christ or are Jewish and celebrate Chanakkah or are of some other religion or none at all I think it is important to take some time in our lives to remember the things that are truly important. For me it is my family, my health, and all of my good friends.

My thoughts and prayers go out to all of the people who are away from loved ones. Especially to the men and women in the armed forces and I pray that they will be kept safe.

I think if everyone were to take some time out to think about what is important to them and how best to achieve it then we would truly have more peace and caring in the world and fewer wars.

Saturday, December 25, 2004 7:24:45 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
# Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Announcing the availability of the Microsoft ASP.NET v1.1 Member Management Component Prototype

This message was in my e-mail this morning. I haven't had time to check it out but it looks like a way to start using the membership management peice from ASP .NET 2.0 right now. The notice at the bottom is important since you should go into this with your eyes wide open but since Rob Howard of Telligent Systems used to work on the ASP .NET team I would bet that any changes would be minor.

Today we have made available the Microsoft ASP.NET v1.1 Member Management Component Prototype on the ASP.NET site.
You can download it at http://www.asp.net/Default.aspx?tabindex=6&tabid=41
Comments, questions, bugs should get posted on the forum at http://www.asp.net/Forums/ShowForum.aspx?tabindex=1&ForumID=186

The Microsoft ASP.NET v1.1 Membership Management Component Prototype contains classes that allow a developer to more easily authenticate users, authorize users, and store per-user property data in a user profile. The authentication feature validates and stores user credentials which a developer can use to manage user authentication on a web site. The authorization feature lets you treat groups of users as a unit by assigning users to roles such as manager, sales, member, and so on. Combined with ASP.NET's built-in authorization functionality, Windows Shared Hosting developers have end-to-end support for maintaining user-to-role mappings and authorizing users based on this information. The profile feature enables you to provide users of your Web site with a custom experience. By defining and using profile properties, you can track any custom information your application requires, including user information and user preferences.

There already two applications in beta using this component; DotNetNuke by Perpetual Motion and Community Server by Telligent Systems.

Important: The functionality provided by this component is a preliminary version of the Membership, Roles, and Profile functionality coming in ASP.NET 2.0 and will change in the final release of ASP.NET 2.0. This means that any ASP.NET v1.1 applications you develop using this component will need to be updated when you migrate to the final release of ASP.NET 2.0. This is also a non Microsoft supported component.

Tuesday, December 14, 2004 7:41:48 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
# Tuesday, December 07, 2004
EXCEPT and INCLUDE in SQL Server 2005

Today I listened to a web cast on TSQL Enhancements in SQL Server 2005. The presenter talked about 2 new keywords that will appear in the next Community Technology Preview. They are EXCEPT and INCLUDE. They will let you look for records that appear in 2 different rowsets. EXCEPT will return the set of all rows in the first rowset that are not in the second rowset. You will write it like:

Select col1 from a
EXCEPT
Select col_1 from b

I think it will be functionally equivalent to:

Select col1 from a
where col1 not in (select col_1 from b)

The INCLUDE will return the set of rows that are in both rowsets.

The one restriction that he mentioned was that the column lists need to be “union compatible” which means they need the same number of columns and the datatype for each column needs to match.

I think this is an interesting solution to the problem of writing a bunch of nested in() or not in () clauses. I can’t wait to get the next CTP and start playing with this. 

Tuesday, December 07, 2004 8:29:30 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
# Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Learn about SQL Server 2005 and win free stuff

If you surf on over to http://msdn.microsoft.com/SQL/2005Webcasts/default.aspx you will see a list of webcasts on SQL Server 2005. In addition to learning a lot about the next version of SQL Server 2005 you will also get a chance to win a shirt or an X-Box.

Here is a list of the webcasts:

Overview of the new Developer features in SQL Server 2005—Level 200
Monday, December 6, 2004
10:00–11:00 A.M. Pacific Time, United States and Canada (UTC-8)
The release of SQL Server 2005 brings with it many new productivity enhancements for the database developer. This webcast will give you a brief overview of the major new developer features of SQL Server 2005.   

Introducing the New SQL Server Management Studio—Level 100
Monday, December 6, 2004
1:00–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time, United States and Canada (UTC-8)
Get an overview of the new tools in SQL Server 2005, including SQL Server Management Studio, Database Tuning Advisor and SQLCMD. Also see the enhancements that have been made to existing tools such as Profiler and SQL Agent.   

SQL Server 2005 as a .NET Runtime Host—Level 100
Monday, December 6, 2004
3:00–4:00 P.M. Pacific Time, United States and Canada (UTC-8)
See how to create database objects such as user-defined types and aggregates in SQL Server 2005, using familiar languages such as C# and Visual Basic .NET.   

Introducing XML in SQL Server 2005—Level 200
Tuesday, December 7, 2004
10:00–11:00 A.M. Pacific Time, United States and Canada (UTC-8)
Learn what the new XML data type will mean to your database applications, and see some simple examples of how to utilize this new feature.   

Introducing ADO.NET 2.0 for SQL Server 2005—Level 200
Tuesday, December 7, 2004
12:00–1:00 P.M. Pacific Time, United States and Canada (UTC-8)
See how SQL Server 2005 provides greater scalability and flexibility in dataset access and manipulation, using the enhancements available in ADO.NET 2.0   

T-SQL Enhancements in SQL Server 2005—Level 200
Tuesday, December 7, 2004
3:00–4:00 P.M. Pacific Time, United States and Canada (UTC-8)
By now you have heard that you can write stored procedures in C# and VB .NET for SQL Server 2005. Does that mean TSQL is dead? NO! A lot has changed in the world of TSQL for SQL Server 2005. Come see the new features of T-SQL for SQL Server 2005, including features such as error handling and XML manipulation, that have been added to make developing with SQL Server easier and more productive.   

The New Security Model in SQL Server 2005—Level 200
Wednesday, December 8, 2004
10:00–11:00 A.M. Pacific Time, United States and Canada (UTC-8)
SQL Server 2005 brings with it many changes to the traditional SQL Server security model. Attend this webcast to learn about the new security model and the basic concepts behind it, as well as new security features such as data encryption.   

Introducing Web Services in SQL Server 2005—Level 200
Wednesday, December 8, 2004
1:00–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time, United States and Canada (UTC-8)
Learn about the new Web service features in SQL Server 2005, such as supporting XML as a first-class data type, providing a new query language for XML documents, and allowing you to perform in-place modifications.   

Introducing Service Broker in SQL Server 2005—Level 200
Wednesday, December 8, 2004
3:00–4:00 P.M. Pacific Time, United States and Canada (UTC-8)
Learn more about SQL Server 2005 Service Broker, a new feature that allows you to build reliable, scalable, asynchronous, queued database applications. Get an overview of the major features of the Service Broker, including queues as database objects; data integrity for queued messages; activation of processing logic triggered by message arrival; and reliable, transactional delivery of messages between SQL Server instances.   

Introducing Reporting Services for SQL Server 2005—Level 200
Thursday, December 9, 2004
10:00–11:00 A.M. Pacific Time, United States and Canada (UTC-8)
Register today to find out more about the Reporting Services enhancements that will be available in SQL Server 2005.   

Introducing SQL Server Integration Services for SQL Server 2005—Level 200
Thursday, December 9, 2004
1:00–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time, United States and Canada (UTC-8)
See what Integration Services (formerly DTS) can do to make your data loading and transformation tasks faster and easier.   

Introducing SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services for Developers—Level 200
Thursday, December 9, 2004
3:00–4:00 P.M. Pacific Time, United States and Canada (UTC-8)
Get an introduction to the main developer features of Analysis Services. This includes an overview of the Unified Dimensional Model (UDM) which provides a rich layer of meta data over a relational source, to provide the best of both traditional OLAP based reporting (performance and analytical capabilities) and relational reporting (currency of the data, and flexibility).   

Introducing Full-Text Search in SQL Server 2005—Level 200
Friday, December 10, 2004
10:00–11:00 A.M. Pacific Time, United States and Canada (UTC-8)
Join this webcast for coverage of the fundamentals of full-text search in SQL Server 2005, including an examination of the new features and performance upgrades that have been introduced in SQL Server 2005 to support this new feature.   

Introducing Replication in SQL Server 2005—Level 200
Friday, December 10, 2004
1:00–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time, United States and Canada (UTC-8)
Get an overview of the new Replication features in SQL Server 2005. See how ease of use and monitoring has been greatly enhanced, along with the ability to synchronize subscriptions over the Internet. We'll also cover replicating new SQL Server 2005 data types and the many improvements in merge replication scalability.   

Introducing Notification Services in SQL Server 2005—Level 200
Friday, December 10, 2004
3:00–4:00 P.M. Pacific Time, United States and Canada (UTC-8)
Get more information about the Notification Services enhancements in SQL Server 2005. Learn about notification applications and how Notification Services in SQL Server 2005 can make it easier for you to build and deploy these applications.   

Wednesday, December 01, 2004 3:11:17 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  |