Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Report Builder 2.0 delivers an intuitive, Office-like report authoring environment enabling business and power users to leverage their experience with Microsoft Office 2007 products. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Report Builder 2.0 supports the full capabilities of SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services including:

• Flexible report layout capabilities of SQL Server 2008 Report Definition Language
• Data Visualizations including charts and gauges
• Richly formatted textboxes
• Export to Microsoft Office Word format

Features specific to Report Builder 2.0 are focused on simplifying the process of creating and editing reports and queries and include the following:

• 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
• Query designers for multiple data sources including a Microsoft SQL Server-specific query designer

Thanks to those who attended the second meeting of the Boise SQL Server User Group. We had a good turnout of around 30 people and I hope everyone enjoyed my presentation of SQL Server 2008 Integration Services (SSIS). I tried to balance the presentation between those who hadn't used SSIS and those who have.

If you are interested in the sample projects, packages, and data files from the talk, here they are.

The newly formed Boise SQL Server User Group kicks off its first meeting with Kalen Delaney on June 25, 2008.

I'm happy to see a Microsoft SQL Server user group in Boise. It will fit nicely with the other development and SharePoint groups in town.

For more information, contact Cindy Gross of Microsoft.

It's generally known that if you want to run any tests, code analysis, or database project build/deployment that you need to install one or more Team Edition of VSTS on your build server. What's not so well known are the licensing ramifications around these scenarios.

Fortunately Jeff Beehler, Team System Chief of Staff, has posted on this subject.

To summarize:

If the users creating the builds are licensed users of the edition in question (or Team Suite), that license extends to Team Foundation Build and you don't need to purchase an additional license. One way to think about it is: the people that are using the Team editions need to be properly licensed which in turn ensures the that the build machines are covered as well. Users who merely queue (execute) and review the automated builds are only required to have a Team Foundation Server CAL.

Back home now, and I have a moment to get the photos downloaded from my camera and uploaded to my blog. Next time I'll take my SD card reader with me.

As you can see, registration was quite busy. I heard that there were 4000 people there, but didn't count them myself. The long lines delayed the keynote by about an hour:

Douglas McDowell and I snuck into the press area. Well, he was officially press (SQL Server Magazine), but I wasn't - still I took more notes than most of the other pressies there.

The main screen was huge, and 3D. We estimated about 80' wide and 20' tall. When no slides were on the screen, there was a spinning 3D Earth enclosed in curley brackets. Hey, what about VB?

After the keynote, there was a short walk to the LA convention center, where the breakout sessions, chalk-talks, exhibitor area, etc. Fortunately, we had these interpretive dancers along the way to keep us from getting lost.

The line to lunch was too long, so we ducked inside to check out the exhibitor area.

I was there (where it says "You Are Here")

Attendees attending one of Doug Seven's chalk talks on Team System.

Doug was all about the writing quality code and the 3 C's in his talk (Code Coverage, Code Analysis, and the new Code Metrics)

After I turned in my evaluation form, I picked up the attendee bag, which had  lots of goodies, including a hard-bound, coffee-table style book called "Heroes Happen Here" which contains IT heroes from all around the world, photographed by Carolyn Jones. And yes, I got my book signed!

In this, my first post of (hopefully) several today, I'm sitting in the keynote session (next to Douglas McDowell), listening to Tom Brokaw warm up the audience. What a nice surprise. It definitely stopped all the geeks in their tracks, to listen to his wise words, gathered from years of experience in all matters mankind.

I loved his opening line "I'm not here to write code, or wire this room". He did, however, wax poetic on the future of technology, the spirit and energy of the types of people who will drive it, and how we must handle it to get their safely."

Some of his quotes during the keynote (some paraphrasing):

• "The test or our place in this world is not yet complete. We don't want to become Easter Island or the Mayan civilization. The use of this technology is not just a virtual experience. If we develop capacity and leave out common sense, what then is the reward to each of us, collectively or individually? If speed overruns reason, what else gets trampled?"
• "We will not solve climate change by hitting backspace. It will do us little good to wire the world if we short circuit our consciousness, our souls and if we don't use this technology to advance mankind."
• "When I left Nightly News I said that I'm not only going to spend my time at suites in the four seasons ... but to spend time in the trenches to meet people who make a difference"
• "One day I woke up in Pakistan in a packing container with Americans who had been there for six months, trying to assess medical and health needs. When they hiked out, they put their hands on the keyboard and distilled what they had learned ... and in so doing, made a big impression ... of those of us in the West who have so much, while they (people in Pakistan) have so little."
• "This technology takes a guiding hand, an imaginative approach, and a hope ..."
• "We have the opportunity to become the next, greatest generation."

Steve Ballmer came on stage next to thank the many platinum sponsors, and discuss how "Dynamic IT" can help manage complexity and achieve agility (especially in the realm software development)

I heard the term "Agile" about 10 times in the span of 3 minutes. More to come ...

Time flies. It's been a year since Dr. Gray, a Microsoft research fellow and Turing Award-winner, went missing while sailing off San Francisco. A year ago, at Boise Code Camp 2.0, I hosted a session on finding Jim Gray, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Now, a year after Dr. Gray went missing, the Association of Computing Machinery (the organization that holds the Turing Awards), the IEEE Computer Society and the University of California-Berkeley have joined to announce a tribute to Gray, planned for May 31 at the UC Berkeley campus. Jim Gray attended UC Berkeley from 1961 to 1969 and earned the school's very first Ph.D. in computer science. Fittingly enough, the tribute will also feature technical sessions for registered participants.

You can find more information about the tribute here:

I know. I know. This doesn't sound like a very interesting post, but it saved me time, and hopefully it can save you some too.

When you install Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft creates a "Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt" shortcut, under that program group.

I like to take this shortcut and drop it on my Quick Launch toolbar:

The problem is that when you install the Team Foundation Server Power Tools (or other new command line utilities) you need to put them in the path.

Well, if you look at the file the shortcut calls, it's vcvarsall.bat, but don't bother editing that file because it calls vcvars32.bat, but don't bother editing that file, because it calls vsvars32.bat. If you go ahead and edit that file, you can find where the PATH is getting set, and add the Power Tools path to it:

@set PATH=C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\BIN;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\Tools;C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5;C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\VCPackages;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2008 Power Tools;%PATH%

I've been so involved with the VSTS RTM yesterday, that I almost didn't notice this one.

Click here to download the latest SQL Server 2008 Community Technology Preview (CTP) and try out the latest features of SQL Server 2008.

It seems that the US Tech-Ed is following Europe's lead, by breaking up the one large conference into two: one for developers and one for IT professionals.

• June 3-6, 2008 - Developers (developers, solution architects, designers, and testers)
• June 10-13, 2008 - IT Professionals

Both events will have a similar format with the past Tech·Eds, but will focus on a single audience instead of a mixed audience, which was the case with the previous Tech·Ed model.

Visit the main Tech-Ed site for more information, including some FAQs.

I just came across this download at Microsoft. It provides an introduction to the concepts and step by step instructions for creating and customizing TFS reports.

The zip file contains instructional PDF documents as well as several sample reports.

Way to go Microsoft, and SQL Server 2005!

For the first time in the report’s history, Microsoft is positioned in the Leader quadrant in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse DBMS. The analysts say that SQL Server 2005 is expected to grow in the data warehouse space and Microsoft’s vision for SQL Server 2008 makes clear the company’s intent to become a major presence in the data warehouse market.

Read more about this great announcement here.

Thanks to the Team System Rangers (an elite squad of TFS experts inside Microsoft) for putting together this document, which serves as a single point of entry into the world of TFS Operations as well as Microsoft's recommended operational best practices.

So, start learning/mastering TFS operations by clicking here.

Microsoft has released a new version of VSTS Web Access Power tool. This release is a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of what will ultimately be the 2008 version of the VSTS Web Access Power Tool.

• Built against the TFS 2008 object model - In previous versions of Web Access you had to install Team Explorer 2005 on any machine you were installing Web Access on. With this version, you will now be installing Team Explorer 2008 instead. In some future version, Microsoft hopes to remove the requirement to install any version of Team Explorer.
• Custom control support - added support for web based work item custom controls and have included a folder of documentation and samples on how to create them.
• Build queuing - added UI for the new TFS 2008 feature of build queuing. You can start new queued builds and view the build queue (in addition to the preexisting abilities - like viewing build details).
• Localization support - added support for localizing the web interface. Microsoft will also be localizing text for the final 2008 Power Tool release.
• Bug fixes & Performance improvements - Microsoft has received a number of reports and done more testing on the current version of the Power Tool, and has fixed everything thus far.

This release (and the final 2008 release) can be used with either a TFS 2005 or a TFS 2008 server.  In either case, you will need to install a TFS 2008 Team Explorer on the machine you install Web Access on. Since TFS 2005 did not support build queuing, that functionality will not be available when this and future versions of Web Access are used with a 2005 server.

You can download it here and read more about it at Brian Harry's blog posting.

Call it a code generator, software factory, or just a clever script. If you can write code that writes code - you win, even if just a small victory for humans in this contest we call software development.

For example, I've been working on an ASP.NET application which contains many data entry screens. You know the kind: very simple, table-format with a label and a textbox of a certain width, that may or may not require some validation. In other words, a whole lot of markup like this:

<tr>

  <td class="EditLabel">Number</td>

  <td class="Edit">

    <asp:TextBox ID="txtNumber" runat="Server" Width="200px" MaxLength="20"></asp:TextBox>

  </td>

</tr>

Now, if you have to type the above more than once or twice, you will go insane (been there, gone there). More importantly, you will probably introduce a bug or two. So, I opened up SQL Server 2005 Management Studio and wrote the following T-SQL code:

USE SomeDB

GO

DECLARE @Table  varchar(128)

DECLARE @Column varchar(128)

DECLARE @Width  varchar(10)

DECLARE @Length int

DECLARE @Type   int

SET @Table = 'Employer' -- Pass this as a parameter

DECLARE ColumnCursor CURSOR FOR

   SELECT C.Name, C.Max_Length, C.User_Type_ID FROM Sys.Columns C

   INNER JOIN Sys.Tables T ON C.Object_ID = T.Object_ID

   WHERE T.Name = @Table

   ORDER BY Column_ID

OPEN ColumnCursor

FETCH NEXT FROM ColumnCursor INTO @Column, @Length, @Type

WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0

BEGIN

  IF @Type <> 36 -- No GUIDs

  BEGIN

    IF @Length < 0 SET @Length = 100

    IF @Length < 10

      SET @Width = '50px'

    ELSE IF @Length < 20

      SET @Width = '100px'

    ELSE IF @Length < 50

      SET @Width = '200px'

    ELSE IF @Length < 100

      SET @Width = '300px'

    ELSE

      SET @Width = '400px'

    PRINT '<tr>'

    PRINT '  <td class="EditLabel">' + @Column + '</td>'

    PRINT '  <td class="Edit">'

    PRINT '    <asp:TextBox ID="txt' + @Column + '" runat="Server" Width="' + @Width + '" MaxLength="' + CONVERT(varchar(10),@Length) + '"></asp:TextBox>'

    PRINT '  </td>'

    PRINT '</tr>'

  END

  FETCH NEXT FROM ColumnCursor INTO @Column, @Length, @Type

END

CLOSE ColumnCursor

DEALLOCATE ColumnCursor

You get the picture. Feel free to customize this code to introduce additional formatting, a slick UI, or other business rules to the mix.

Microsoft's Patterns & Practices group recently released the final version of the “Team Development with Team Foundation Server” Guide. This guide has been in beta for the last couple of months.

It shows you how to get the most out of Team Foundation Server to help improve the effectiveness of your team-based software development. Whether you are already using Team Foundation Server or adopting from scratch, you’ll find guidance and insights you can tailor for your specific scenarios. It's a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, Team System team members, and industry experts.

Some quick facts:

• 496 – Total number of pages
• 18 – Total number of chapters in this guide
• 11392 – Total number of downloads of the Beta version of this guide
• 8 – Number of attempts to get the Adobe build to work to generate the guide in .pdf format
• 60 – Number of external and MSFT contributors and reviewers

Download the guide from CodePlex.

Yesterday, Microsoft released a tool to migrate from IBM ClearCase to TFS.

Find more information on TFS migration topics, keep an eye on this blog.

My students this week told me about the new version. I remember using the original XML Notepad, and it was great, very simple.

For the longest time, I couldn't find it on Microsoft's site to download, and then a newer version showed up on CodePlex.

Microsoft has published a detailed KB article about the problems fixed by SR1. The article includes a link to download the update.

Aside from many fixes, there are three major improvements found in this release:

• Cross-database references - support is improved so that you can reference objects within different databases by using database project references or by referencing a database metafile (.dbmeta). This support reduces or eliminates the cross-database reference warnings within a database project
• Improved file support within SQL Server file groups - you can define files within file groups as database project properties instead of having to create files and file groups within the pre-deployment storage script.
• Variables - a Variables page is added to the database properties. This new page enables you to define setvar variables for use in the deployment scripts.

Not only did Microsoft just recently post Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) a few days ago, but yesterday Microsoft made a CTP of the next generation of Visual Studio Team System (codename Rosario) available for download. Craziness ... which do I spend my time with? It's like having two mistresses to pick from.

Anyway, here are the details, if you want to start playing with Rosario: (keep in mind that it won't ship until some time [6,12,18?] months post Visual Studio 2008, so at least 2009):

• Read Jeff Beehler's blog posting
• Read the Rosario Overview whitepaper
• Download the VPC images (8+ files, 700mb each)
• Download the Rosario documentation
• Visit the MSDN newsgroups dedicated to Rosario
• Visit the MSDN homepage for Rosario

Finally, and most important, provide feedback to the team using http://connect.microsoft.com.

Over the past few years, a few of my clients have deployed Team Foundation Server Proxy to improve the performance of their remote/distributed teams. It boosts network performance by caching copies of source control files in a remote location, local to the developer needing the files but away from the main source control location. In short, the proxy helps each user avoid a costly download of the files to their workspace across the slower connection.

So why wouldn't this work for Team Build?

In today's VSTS chat, I asked if anyone had done this. I should have expected that Buck Hodges would have, and even blogged about it.

Still trying to decide if Team System is right for you and if you can afford it. I would say you can't afford *not* to have it. Check out this list of case studies from other companies and teams who agree with me.

Thanks to Rob Caron, for putting together this consolidated list of the "top" Visual Studio Team System case studies. They support a wide range of propositions by showcasing real customers who have gone through the adoption process and have great stories to tell.

Microsoft just released their Team System Web Access Power Tool (formerly known as TeamPlain). This is a Web interface to Team Foundation Server.

If you have team members that don't want Visual Studio/Team Explorer installed on their desktop, but they still want to participate with the project lifecycle, this is a great, web-based approach to getting everyone connected quickly/easily. Here are some of the features:

• Add new work items or edit existing ones
• Work with any type of work item, including custom ones
• Add new work item queries or edit existing ones
• View, download, upload, check-in and check-out documents on SharePoint team portal
• View reports, export as PDF or Excel
• Browse source control repositories, download files, view changesets, diffs, histories, and annotated views
• View build results, start or stop builds
• Search for keywords in work items
• Authentication Modes: Integrated Windows Authentication or Forms Based Authentication (Recommended to use with SSL)

Read more about it in Brian Harry's blog posting.

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. In addition, discuss what's new in Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2.

Microsoft will be holding two sessions:

• Join the chat on Wednesday, August 1^st, 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time. Add to Calendar
• Join the chat on Wednesday, August 1^st, 2007 from 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time. Add to Calendar

Ok, I finally got fed up with all of the spam in my historical dasBlog postings. It's really embarrassing to send a link to a a colleague, only to have them snicker at all of the spam comments and trackbacks.

For those of you who don't know what a trackback is, it's basically an acknowledgement that enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. When used properly, trackbacks form a communication link between the two blogs, so that new comments on one blog can basically ping the other, allowing readers to easily follow discussions on both. The problem is that spammers have abused this mechanism and bloggers end up with trackbacks and pingbacks to various gambling, herbal medication, and adult sites.

Earlier this year I joined the ranks, and disabled my trackback and pingback services in dasBlog. I then followed Scott Hanselman's advice on using Akismet spam blocking service.

The big effort was then how to cleanup the <Comment> and <Trackback> elements that were spam, so, like others before me, I built a tool to assist with this.

1. Download ScrubDasBlog.zip or ScrubDasBlogSource.zip to your hard drive
2. Edit the blacklist.txt to include your own blacklisted URLs *
3. Backup your existing feedback files: \content\*.dayentry.xml
4. Run the ScrubDasBlog utility, specifying the path to your \content folder and the path to your blacklist.txt file, for example:

scrubdasblog c:\inetpub\wwwroot\mydasblog\content c:\scrubdasblog\blacklist.txt

* If you have predominately more SPAM comments and trackbacks in your dasBlog history, then you can generate a starter blacklist by going into your \content sub-folder and typing the following:

type *.xml | find "AuthorHomepage" > blacklist.txt

After you generate the blacklist.txt file, you should remove any good sites and remove any duplicates, before running the ScrubDasBlog utility.

I would recommend downloading the Source code version and reading through my code. Please comment on any improvements you might make.

Bookmark this page. For the next several weeks, Scott Golightly (Microsoft Regional Director from Utah) and I will be publishing several instructional videos around Team System.

Currently, there are two videos posted:

• How Do I: Customize TeamPlain?
• How Do I: Create Custom Work Items in Team Foundation Server?

More coming each week. Stay tuned ...

I saw a demo of these at Tech-Ed, and thought I would share with my friends.

Essentially, the Database Operations team at Microsoft uses a suite of jobs on all their servers for performing backups, automated database maintenance, improve performance , and improving disaster recovery. I'm sure every SQL Server expert/consultant out there has his or her own bag of tricks, but Microsoft is finally sharing theirs.

These SQL maintenance jobs provide automated tasks such as database or transaction logs backup, performing database optimization like Index defrag or update statistics, cleaning MSDB backup history and recycling the SQL error log. Each of these jobs runs stored procedures that are installed when the jobs are created.

The following are the jobs get installed with this package.

• SQLBackupAll
• SQLBackupDiffAll
• SQLBackupTranAll
• SQLBackupChecker
• SQLDBCCAll
• SQLIndexDefragAll
• SQLUpdateStatistics
• SQLCleanupMsdbBackupHistory
• SQLCycleErrorLog

Download the automation jobs here, and then refer to the Word document inside.

This week Microsoft released the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server – Project Server 2007 connector as a CodePlex project. The project has been up for a few weeks, but is now being broadly advertised.

The TFS-PS2007 connector is designed to integrate the project management capabilities of TFS with Project Server 2007. It's been developed by the Visual Studio Team System Rangers in response to significant customer demand for a connector solution. Future versions of Team System will have native integration with Project Server, in the meantime this Connector solution is the best way to integrate the two Microsoft products. This solution builds on the previous PS2003 VSTS Connector, published on GotDotNet.

Today's chats were well attended, with many experts and well over a hundred guests. The quests came fast and furious, with some great answers given by the experts. It seems people are really anticipating Orcas (and Rosario) for those features that didn't make it into v1.

I have captured the entire transcripts (both expert and guest chats) in this PDF document (for the 10am PST chat) and this PDF document (for the 4pm PST chat).

Note: this is the raw content, copied and pasted from each chat, so you are getting it "as is".

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Team Editions for Architects, Developers, Database Pros, and Testers. In addition, discuss what's new in the in the Visual Studio code name “Orcas” Beta 1 releases for Team Suite and Team Foundation Server.

Join the chat on Friday, April 27th, 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time | Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

Yesterday, Microsoft's Developer Division (DevDiv) released beta 1 of Visual Studio "Orcas", which corresponds with the Connected Systems Division’s beta 1 release of the .NET Framework 3.5. Soma blogged this yesterday morning. Visual Studio "Orcas" enables developers and development teams to rapidly create Software + Services on the latest platforms, including the Web, Windows Vista, the 2007 Office System, and Windows Server "Longhorn".

As usualy, one of the most common questions about Orcas is, "When will it ship?". Well, here's Microsoft's official/public timeline:

Trainers and presenters have been wanting a sample database that is less complex than AdventureWorks, but more interesting than Northwind. Thanks to my friends at SolidQ for letting me know about AdventureWorksLT (Light) ...

You can download AdventureWorksLT from CodePlex or Microsoft.

Just to catch you up, Microsoft's Team Foundation Server v1.0 (released March 2006) only works with WSS 2.0. WSS 2.0 is the old version. WSS 3.0 is the new version, and launched with Microsoft Office 2007. It's full of great new features, but alas TFS won't integrate with it naturally. Even installing TFS SP1 won't get you there.

Thanks to Brian Keller, a Technical Evangelist for Team System, who has published a document on how to integrate TFS with WSS 3.0. As Brian explains, keep in mind that this is a "release candidate" of guidance that will eventually be posted to MSDN.

Now I've heard of a lot of things, but an RC of a guidance document?

SQL Injection attacks are a well know exploit of insecure database systems. If you don't know about SQL Injection, you can change that by visiting Wikipedia.

If you feel like injecting some SQL into your site, you should visit the SQL Injection Cheat Sheet page for all of the approaches. As the author mentions, only MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, (some) ORACLE, and (some) PostgreSQL are supported and that most of the samples are not correct for every situation.

Happy hacking!

I'm a bit late to the party, but I wanted to recognize a couple of cool 2007 Jolt Award winners ...

• Microsoft and the VSTS/Database Professionals product group for "Database Engines and Data Tools" (read more here and here)
• Scott Ambler for his awesome book, Refactoring Databases.
• stpBA Storyboarding for VSTS 

In fact, here are all the winners.

I've been in Orlando this week, speaking at SQL Connections and have been derelict in my blogging duties, especially with regard to VSTS.

• Microsoft announced on Monday that they had acquired DevBiz (the company that produces TeamPlain), which has been the leader in browser-based access to Team Foundation Server, further boosting cross-platform access (and adoption). TeamPlain Web Access also enables a peripheral team member to browse project information and manipulate work items, source code, etc. I believe the new, official name will become "Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Web Access" (another mouthful). This acquisition also means that we will get to use TeamPlain for FREE (assuming we have a proper client access license for TFS). Read more about the acquisition on Brian Harry's blog and Microsoft PressPass.
  
  
• Microsoft published their Visual Studio Team System "Future Releases" roadmap, even beyond Orcas. So now, we can all speak the words "Rosario" in public. Rosario is the codename for the version of VSTS beyond Orcas. The roadmap is very thorough, even listing service packs and power tools, so you know exactly what delivery vehicle your feature or fix will be arriving in.
  
  
• Gert Drapers (the data dude) announced Service Release (SR) 1 for VSTS Edition for Database Professionals. He says that it's "in the works" and will be published sometime in Q2 of 2007 (let's hope April). He lists a few of the fixes and features that will be in the SR in a recent blog posting.
  
  
• Yesterday, Microsoft announced that unit testing will become a feature of the Professional edition of Visual Studio Orcas. This has been a passionately-requested feature by everyone in the world not running Dev, Test, or Team Suite editions. Finally, everyone who has Professional edition and up will be able to write and run unit tests. What about code coverage, that's still a question.
  
  
• The Patterns and Practices team has released updated prescriptive guidance on VSTS. JD Meiers lists many of the improvements on a blog post and you can find the guidance itself on CodePlex.
  
  
• Speaking of guidance, Microsoft recently published a 40-page branching guidance document which does a very good job of explaing branching and merging strategies for various size teams.

The next Ask An Expert Live Chat is scheduled for Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 12:00 PM PDT. 
  
Mark your calendars (or click this ICS link). For more information, visit Microsoft Technical Chats.

We all have our favorite database structure generator or schema reporting tool. Maybe we have built one of them in the past. I always tell my clients that it's a great "first application" to build when learning SQL Management Objects (SMO).

I just found out about SqlSpec.

SqlSpec generates documentation in two formats: HTML or CHM. I particularly like the CHM format, especially when you want a single, compact file containing all your documentation about one or more databases. The CHM is indexed so it is easily searchable for any keyword. If you visit their Samples page, you can see what these CHM files look like.

Naturally, SqlSpec supports SQL Server and Analysis Services, but also other legacy databases like Oracle, MySQL, and Access. It's $149 and they have a free trial version.

Pretty slick.

One of the coolest controls that Visual Studio 2005 includes is the report design and view functionality of the ReportViewer controls. What used to be a server-only function, .RDL (now .RDLC) files can be rendered client-side by Web or Windows applications with this control. Reports can contain tabular, aggregated, and multidimensional data.

Thanks to Peter Myers for pointing me to this site to answer all of my (and your) questions and help unlock the hidden potential of the ReportViewer control.

Over the weekend Microsoft released some cool add-ins for Excel 2007 and Visio 2007:

• Table Analysis Tools for Excel - this add-in provides you with easy-to-use tasks that leverage SQL Server 2005 Data Mining under the covers to perform powerful analytics on your spreadsheet data.
• Data Mining Client for Excel - This add-in allows you to go through the full data mining model development lifecycle within Excel 2007 using either your spreadsheet data or external data accessible through your SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services instance.
• Data Mining Templates for Visio - This add-in allows you to render and share your mining models as annotatable Visio 2007 drawings.

Download the new add-ins here.

There are way too many Crystal Reports out there in the world and I would love to see more of them converted to Reporting Services. Therein lies the problem. I had heard that Crystal (now BusinessObjects) had blocked companies, like Hitachi, from building converters, because they would be reverse engineering (or using the APIs to reverse engineer) the .rpt files, and that would violate the license agreement.

Microsoft only provides migration guidance, but I see that one company, KTL Solutions, has a conversion product available, and another company, Jeff-Net is offering a $25/report conversion service at rpttordl.com.

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Team Editions for Architects, Developers, Database Pros, and Testers. In addition, discuss what's new in the latest Community Technology Preview (CTP).

Join the chat on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time.

As many of you may know, Dr. Jim Gray (Microsoft Researcher and Turing award recipient) went missing a week ago, on his sailboat Tenacious off the coast of San Francisco. I've had the pleasure, on several occasions, of speaking with Jim and learning more about his research. If we cannot find him, it will be a huge loss.

The search for Tenacious (and Jim) is underway, in a big way. Many news agencies are calling it the largest private search for a missing person ever. This blog is aggregating all of the latest information. Best of all, YOU CAN HELP! Visit Amazon's Mechanical Turk site dedicated to finding Jim, and help by searching new/updated high resolution satellite imagery. All of the instructions are provided, you just need to donate some time.

The much anticipated and eagerly awaited Analysis Services 2005 Performance Guide has been released and is available on the Microsoft download site.