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For those into these kind of things, the excellent Kryoton Suite has reached the grand old age of 3 – its a superb control suite for use in Windows Applications and allows you to create the most eye catching software. It is also very reasonable for us developers on a budget 
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I found this superb guide to google chrome, loads of shortcuts and hidden gems to play around with.
http://lifehacker.com/5045904/the-power-users-guide-to-google-chrome
I was lucky enough to visit Microsoft during the CTP period and was testing out integrated full text search in 2008. An issue we experienced was that full text can be slow when there is a high number of updates to the index and is caused by blocking on the docidfilter internal table.
It appears to happen if:
- You have AUTO tracking on your full text indexes; although we changed it to manual and still had this issue.
- You experience Full-text queries taking a long time to execute; normally when updates are happening at the same time so you might only see this in production.
- One or more of your queries are complicated or take some time to complete.
You can check to see if your system is slow due to this by:
- SELECT * FROM sys.dm_os_wait_stats statement , it shows very high wait times some of the locks.
- Running Sp_who2; it should consistently show that the full-text gather is blocking full-text queries and, in turn, is being blocked by the queries.
The current work around for this issue is to use a global trace flag microsoft kindly enabled on the RTM build. To use this, type the following Transact-SQL statement:
DBCC TRACEON (7646, -1)
This has a minor side-effect.. which may or may not be important in your organisation. Certainly in ours, it is not. Your full text result may be ever so slightly out of date – e.g. you might return or not return a particular document from the index. However, this issue relates to the dirtyness of an index in terms of 10’s of milliseconds. Important? Unlikely….
I believe there is a knowledge base article on this.
Some great 2008 material here:
http://sqlserver2008jumpstart.microsofttraining.com/content/info.asp?CcpSubsiteID=69&infoid=27
If you are using Visual Studio Team System you get Microsoft’s Test built in and you are able to easily using unit testing against MVC. However, if you want to use NUnit or another testing framework you need to carry out a few steps at the moment.
Follow this really easy tutorial for getting it work.
http://quickstarts.asp.net/3-5-extensions/mvc/MVCCustomTestFramework.aspx
A template will be available soon from NUnit I believe but as at the time of this article it is not ready to download.
This is an interesting article on an issue with LINQ to SQL and what SQL Server does with procedure caching coming from LINQ.
http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/DataMgmt/DataDesign/linq-to-sql-queries-involving-strings-ca
In summary, each where condition depending on the size of the value will cause a different plan to be created – e.g if the value passed into a WHERE clause was ‘This Value’ and another was ‘Another Value’ – two entries will be kept in the procedure cache… one a NVARCHAR (10) and another NVARCHAR (13)..
I have no checked SP1 to see if this is resolved. If anyone knows, please let me know.
Missing the report builder, can’t wait for the RTM?
Report Builder 2.0 RC1 is now available on Microsoft Download Center. Use this link for download.
RC1 delivers improvements in the following areas compared to RC0:
- Easy to use wizards for creating table, matrix and chart data regions.
- Support for directly opening and editing reports stored on the report server.
- Support for using server resources such as shared data sources.
- A query designer for Microsoft SQL Server data sources.
- Enhancements to the Report Builder 2.0 ribbon.
So.. enjoy!
SQL Server 2008 Express tools are now available…
- SQL Server database engine – create, store, update and retrieve your data
- SQL Server database engine – create, store, update and retrieve your data
- SQL Server Management Studio Basic – visual database management tool for creating, editing and managing databases
- SQL Server database engine – create, store, update and retrieve your data
- SQL Server Management Studio Basic – visual database management tool for creating, editing and managing databases
- Full-text Search – powerful, high-speed engine for searching text-intensive data
- Reporting Services – integrated report creation and design environment to create reports
The company I work for is recruiting!, if you have some of the following please get in touch.
SQL Server 2005 experience
- Service Broker
- SSIS
- Profiling/Performance
- Transactional Replication
- Custom Replication
Any knowledge of SQL 2008 would be an advantage as would experience of high volume transactional databases (web focused).
I am attending the community led event this evening in Victoria, London which is focused on LINQtoSQL and the new entity framework. I have blogged before about my reserverations on LINQ from a pure SQL point of view but I am always open to new technology and I do realise LINQtoSQL has it’s place.
At some point at the weekend I will blog about this evening’s event , assuming I gain any knowledge worth sharing of course.
