Well… at least the signal to noise ratio for this blog had improved for the last couple of weeks. I've been buried with real-world work, and Janell and I have been traveling for the holidays and so. But I did want to pause for a moment and blog about some issues.
First up, big thanks to Kevin and Lizzie for hosting Thanksgiving again this year. We had a great time in the wilds of Western Wisconsin. If you can make it Black River Falls anytime soon, you really should stop by the Pioneer Brewery and see the new hospitality room and give the Coffee Stout a try. Todd makes killer beer.
In case you haven't seen it, Hilary Cotter has his new SQL Server 2000 Replication book printed and available for sale. He was nice enough to mention me in the introduction, but folks, trust me, I'm nobody special compared to him. If you really need an intense, deep drilldown in snapshot and Transaction replication from Soup To Nuts, you've got to have this book. Look for a longer review in a few days. Teo Lachev was also good enough to send me a copy of his Report Services tome too. I need to get on that one quickly.
The next GoSQLServer meeting with be January 13th at 1Staff in Omaha. Our guest speaker is Don Bryner from Microsoft. He will be talking about SQL Server 2005. Reminds me that I've got work on getting this on the site today, since In a couple of hours, I'll be off to the Heartland Developer's Conference in Des Moines. I've been looking forward to this. I'll be around helping Joe and Phil make sure the show runs smoothly. It will also be great fun to hang out with Robert, Adam, Rocky, Sam, Matt, Jeff and JC again too. Hope to see many of you at the reception tonight.
I've spent more than a few daylight hours working on the new HDRinc.com web site. I think we've really got a killer site in the works. It is been a good example for me how we could use ASP.NET 2.0 in future to do a lot of things the easy way as compared to how were doing lots of things the hard way with ASP.NET 1.1, especially master pages.
Bob Beauchemin (aka BobTheGod) and I have had a number of good conversations about Yukon too. I've long been laboring under the misconception that you couldn't do inheritance from one SQLCLR class to another. Not only did he show that it was in fact possible to that, the way he did it was amazing to watch. Bob is great teacher not only because he knows the material, but because of his style. If you can't tell, I'm really geeked about getting to go to Gorilla Yukon week after next. Yes, the content is the big reason, but getting the chance to watch Bob and Dan do it live should be awesome.
Otherwise, I've been working on technical reviews of a book that Apress should be going to print with soon on Yukon. It is interesting to me to how different folks write. The authors are both in the UK so every now and then something will be phrased just differently enough to catch my attention. I'm also putting together thoughts for a book I want to write on SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. Speaking of Express, I was hearing rumors of a November CTP. Well, that looks to have come and gone, but I wouldn't be too surprised if we see new bits in the next few days. I'm hoping that XM will be with them too.
Just a heads up too if you're using sp_helpuser with SQL Server 2000, Yukon now returns a default schema column in the middle of ResultSet regardless of the compatibility level. No, this isn't a bug, but yes, it would be nice if they'd not inserted into the middle of the columns. And no, that new column isn't in BOL05.