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Slides from April/May Architect Forum Talks 09 May 2008 11:59

Over the past few weeks I presented at the recent round of Architect Forums hosted by Mark Carroll talking about ORM's, LINQ and changes in the way we are working with data when building software solutions.

From the feedback the talk was well recieved, and I appreciated the good amount of discussion that has come out of it (both during the sessions themselves and the ensuing emails I have recieved) - thanks for all your thoughts :)

I have uploaded the slides from the session, so you can download them and use them as you wish. A number of you asked if you could re-present some of the material internally, and as usual there is definitely no problem with that! :)

Download Slides

If you are keen in finding out more about LightSpeed and some of the things I showed, we have more information on the product page and you can sign up for the beta of LightSpeed 2 if that interests you also.

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I like it.. 15 Apr 2008 16:15

Fresh from the build box..

Just a little something that Ivan has been cooking up over the last week or so :)

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Announcing WPF Elements 14 Apr 2008 10:49

Hot on the heels of our very popular WPF Property Grid, we have followed up with a line of business focused control suite for WPF which we feel provides the "essential" controls for anyone developing line of business applications.

We have called this new offering WPF Elements and it includes the following controls:

If you are doing any WPF development, download the trial and give the controls a spin - if you like them, then you can pick a copy from our online store. Also if you are interested in the Property Grid then you might like to take advantage of our "Controls Combo" special which will let you buy the Enterprise Edition of both the Property Grid and Elements for only $50 more than one of the single packages - nice! :)

If you have any feedback or queries, drop us a line in the online forums - we look forward to getting your thoughts! :)

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Congrats Ivan! 02 Apr 2008 17:25

As I mentioned in my last post, yesterday was an MVP award day. The notifications actually are centred around the US timezone, so they have been streaming out today.

So it is my pleasure to also announce that Ivan Towlson has been awarded an MVP award for C# development. Ivan has been very active on the local mailing lists tirelessly answering questions and making a great contribution to the community. Not only that, but he has been heavily involved with the local user groups presenting nationally on WPF (a subject which he is very much an expert on!)

Congrats Ivan!!

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Congrats JD! 02 Apr 2008 16:07

Yesterday a new round of MVP's were awarded, including my fellow Mindscape director John-Daniel, who was awarded for his technical expertise in ASP.NET.

Congrats JD!!

If you have not heard much about the award, you can learn more about it from the MVP Community Site..

"Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for voluntarily sharing their high quality, real world expertise in offline and online technical communities. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts that represents the technical community's best and brightest, and they share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others."

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SQL Server 2008 for Developers - Some additional questions 27 Mar 2008 11:12

During the Wellington leg of the Launch Wave, James Hippolite, a regular in the local community gave a nice long list of questions as a follow up to the session.

Rather than answering them then and there James asked if I could blog the responses. I also recieved a number of other questions along similar lines so I thought I would collate all the answers here so everyone could benefit.

GENERAL

1. Does CTP 6 contain the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS)

Yes - CTP6 contains an updated version of BIDS which integrates with Visual Studio 2008 with the same templates available.

SQL SERVER FILESTREAM

1. Can I have more than 1 FILESTREAM group defined in the CREATE DATABASE statement?

Yes - you can specify multiple FILEGROUPS containing FILESTREAM data. The first group you create will be set as the initial default if you dont specify otherwise, and you can then use the FILESTREAM ON clause for CREATE TABLE to indicate which FILEGROUP you want your FILESTREAM data for that table to use.

2. Can we have sub-folders in the FILESTREAM data folder?

No - the internal structure of the FILESTREAM directories is maintained by SQL Server.

3. Why did you create an ID column and a GUID column in the Photo table?

FILESTREAM requires a ROWGUIDCOL column to be declared which it uses to uniquely identify the row. You can see how this is used if you select .PathName() on your FILESTREAM column, the end GUID will be the value of the ROWGUIDCOL column for that row.

The ID column was my normal identity column.

4. Can you use FILESTREAM with replication?

Yes. Databases containing FILESTREAM data can be replicated and log shipped but NOT mirrored (See Books Online to understand the restrictions on the FILESTREAM feature). There is a size limit on Web based replication, but standard replication treats the data as a varbinary(max) and will work even if the target database is not using FILESTREAM.

SPARSE COLUMNS

1. Must SPARSE columns be defined at the end of the column set for the table?

No. You can declare any column as a SPARSE column as long as it is nullable (or if it is of the GEOGRAPHY, GEOMETRY, IMAGE or NTEXT data types).

One other capability around sparse columns which I didnt mention during the talk, was the ability to define a "column set" column for the table. This is a feature which allows you to change the behavior of "select * .." when operating on the table with SPARSE columns. In essense, a column set declares an xml column which will aggregate togethor all of the SPARSE columns in an XML document structure. This can make it a bit easier to work with this type of data since by definition you will be storing "optional" data using SPARSE columns.

BobB has some additional info on column sets in one of his recent blog posts.

TRANSPARENT DATA ENCRYPTION

1. When you enabled encryption for the database, the cursor returned immediately. Did it really go to disk and change all the data on disk?

No - it spawned a background thread which performs the initial encryption work. While this is running maintainence operations on the database are not able to be run, so if you are encrypting a large existing database you will want to schedule this in appropriately. Books Online has more details about this process and what the restrictions are.

2. Does FILESTREAM data get encrypted as well?

No - FILESTREAM data is not supported by Transparent Data Encryption, however you can encrypt the data using EFS. This may seem logical or absurd depending on your POV :)

MISC

1. How were you inserting the Photo data into the database?

I was using a little console application called "PhotoLoader" which I wrote specifically for loading in the test data. It has been provided in the samples I posted earlier. It is a very simple program that loads in the file data from disk and then passes it to the ImportPhoto stored procedure which we created as part of the session.

If you have other questions just email them through :)

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SQL Server 2008 for Developers 27 Mar 2008 10:43

After 4 great events in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland we are finally done and dusted with Launch Wave 08! Thanks to everyone who joined us for the Community Summer Road Trip and for the Launch Wave 08 events over the last couple of months.

As promised, here are the resources from my session "SQL Server 2008 for Developers". It was great to get such positive feedback on the session so I hope the additional resources help furthor in getting you started.

Download: Slides in .pptx format (1.66mb)
Download: Slides in .ppt format (3.90mb)
Download: Code and Demos (915kb)

Remember, the best thing to do next is to download the latest CTP drop for SQL Server from here and get it installed into a test environment!

To run the code and demos, you will need to have SQL Server 2008 CTP 6, Visual Studio 2008, and the Entity Framework Beta 3 installed. I have included the test data and setup scripts I used during the session as well which will allow you to work with the same test data, post a comment or drop me an email if you have any queries or issues.

Some other links you might find useful are:

ADO.NET Team Blog - useful for Entity Framework information and discussion
Bob Beauchemins Blog
Euan Gardens Blog
Simon Sabins Blog

Happy coding!

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