The Bit Bucket

Arthur C Clarke made his final orbit of the Sun today

Arthur C Clarke made his final orbit of the Sun today

I was really sad to hear that Arthur C Clarke died today. For those that enjoyed his work, it’s worth watching his “goodbye” video he made on the occasion of his birthday in December 2007. He knew at that time that the end was near. I particularly liked his choice of a Rudyard Kipling poem to read at the end. You’ll find the video here: YouTube Video

2008-03-19

Read more…
SQL: Notification Services isn't deprecated in SQL 2k8, it's gone

SQL: Notification Services isn't deprecated in SQL 2k8, it's gone

Darren Neimke posted a link to some great content today from his colleague Steven Nagy. Steven had done a bunch of posts on getting started with Notification Services.

It’s a great set of posts but it’s important to get the message out that in the next version of the product, Notification Services isn’t just deprecated, it’s gone. It isn’t wise to use it for any new development work unless you’re intending to stay on SQL Server 2005 for the life of your application.

2008-02-24

Read more…
LINQ Terminology 101 for DBAs and Others Puzzled

LINQ Terminology 101 for DBAs and Others Puzzled

I was responding to a discussion in the SQL MVP newsgroups today about LINQ. A comment was made about understanding of the basic terminology and layers of software. I figured I should blog this as well to help someone.

  1. LINQ per se is unrelated to databases. It’s a language extension that provides an easy to use query syntax for things that are enumerable. You can build a “LINQ to xxx” provider where xxx is almost anything. The thing I find weird about it is that they used SQL keywords as operators at all.

    2008-02-22

Read more…
General: TechEd Orlando - 4 sessions and lots of friends there too

General: TechEd Orlando - 4 sessions and lots of friends there too

I got the good news today that I’ve had 4 sessions accepted in the first round of approvals for TechEd Orlando. Two are in the developer week and two in the IT Pro week. I’m really looking forward to those two weeks as TechEd’s are always great events.

Good to see so many of my colleagues also doing sessions. Peter Myers has two precons together with Douglas McDowell and Craig Utley. Peter also has two sessions in the dev week. Adam Machanic is really excited about his first TechEd session coming up. I just know it’ll be great so don’t miss it. Fernando Guerrero has an interesting session planned, Andrew Kelly has several as does Itzik Ben-Gan both of whom are always great value. Maciej Pilecki also has a session this year that looks excellent.

2008-02-19

Read more…