Richard Campbell has posted a detailed blog entry describing the challenges and (part of the) innerworkings of the Strangeloop AppScaler.

Recently I've started using VSTS for DB Pro. I've installed CTP 2 of Service Release 1, and it's been great.

The VSTS DB Pro team plans to release power tools for VSTS DB Pro as well. These are tools that will be released as soon as possible, without having to wait for a major release.

The Power Tools are listed on the Future Release page of VSTS: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/bb407307.aspx

Team Edition for Database Professionals Power Tools

Rocky has an interesting post responding to something Martin wrote about.

I'm afraid I do have to agree with Martin a little.

I've run a huge usergroup for the last couple of years (2500+ developers, www.sdn.nl) with members from all corners of development world and the enthousiasm displayed by a Delphi or FoxPro developer is much larger than a .NET developer. Don't get me wrong, there are people out there who are very enthousiastic about all Microsoft technologies, I'm one of them, but if I'd have to throw a ball park number out there, then I'd say that 50% of the Delphi programmers are active in communities whereas only 5% of the Microsoft developers do more than 'just show up for work'.

I always like to say that in any profession you have workers and you have craftsmen. Workers come in for the paycheck. Craftsmen take pride in their work, love it and go the extra mile. The Microsoft arena perhaps has ratio wise a larger % of workers. Why? Anyones guess. Perhaps the whole certification processes and quality of tooling make it easier to be a worker in Microsoft land then in other products..

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

I just discovered that my uncle, Evert Blomsma, has put up a brand new website for his company: PetroNomics.

Forrester has published a report called Software Change And Configuration Management, Q2 2007.

Interesting read for anyone looking at ALM tooling.

I've been doing some technical writing for Amazon Web Services, so now I'm trying to keep an eye on what's going on at their shop.

They've just announced a price cut got their Amazon S3 service.

Read more on: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261

I ran across this on Bink.nu. It's amazing! I want one!!!

Go to: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

"Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today announced the availability of a new software-based WAN optimization client that extends LAN-like application performance to mobile employees, even when they are working outside of branch office locations. In an industry first, Citrix will also demonstrate the new Citrix WANScaler™ client working seamlessly with its market-leading Citrix Access Gateway™ SSL VPN solution at Interop Las Vegas 2007 this week, eliminating the traditional trade off between fast application performance and secure application access for mobile employees."

Read more: http://citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=657501

In earlier posts I already blogged about creating some simple queuing solutions with SQL Server Service Broker. Last week I spend some time actually implementing my research in a customer project and of course ran into two 'interesting' issues.

1. It is possible for the Service Broker to somehow die on you, whilst appearing to be up and running and with RETENTION=ON sent message appear to be in the queue.
   

   When using the SQL Profiler it becomes clear that messages don't get processed because the Service Broker is not enabled.
   
   You can use the following statement to enable Service Broker:
   
   alter database PFA_DATA set ENABLE_BROKER
   

   I had to do it on two machines and on of them gave me the following error:
   
   Msg 9772, Level 16, State 1, Line 2
   The Service Broker in database "PFA_DATA" cannot be enabled because there is already an enabled Service Broker with the same ID.
   Msg 5069, Level 16, State 1, Line 2
   ALTER DATABASE statement failed.
   

   So instead I used:
   
   alter database PFA_DATA set NEW_BROKER

    

   After this the Service Broker was up and running and message started getting delivered.
   
   If the query takes extremely long to complete restart SQL Server and try again.
   
   One potential cause for this is when you restore a database.
   

2. In my earlier post I just blatantly used WITH CLEANUP to avoid getting EndDialog messages.
   The documentation however states:
   
   WITH CLEANUP
   Remove all messages and catalog view entries for this side of the conversation without notifying the other side of the conversation. Microsoft SQL Server drops the conversation endpoint, all messages for the conversation in the transmission queue, and all messages for the conversation in the service queue. Use this option to remove conversations which cannot complete normally. For example, if the remote service has been permanently removed, you use WITH CLEANUP to remove conversations to that service.

   
   So use this sparingly.
   
   I've discovered a much cleaner way to handle it.
   When sending a message you can use "END CONVERSATION @dialog" to specify that as far as the sender is concerned the dialog is over. In other words: a fire and forget message.
   When the receiving side of the conversation receives the messages and performs its "END CONVERSATION" statement, Service Broker will detect that no acknowledgement (EndDialog) needs to be send.

Today Microsoft released the Beta 1 of Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Guide.  It's the Microsoft playbook for TFS.  This is the guide to help show you how to make the most of Team Foundation Server.  It's a distillation of many lessons learned.  It's a collaborative effort among product team members, field, industry experts, MVPs, and customers.

Contents at a Glance

• Part I, Fundamentals
• Part II, Source Control
• Part III, Builds
• Part IV, Large Project Considerations
• Part V, Project Management
• Part VI, Process Guidance
• Part VII, Reporting
• Part VIII, Setting Up and Maintaining the Team Environment

Chapters

• Introduction
• Ch 01 - Introducing the Team Environment
• Ch 02 - Team Foundation Server Architecture
• Ch 03 - Structuring Projects and Solutions
• Ch 04 - Structuring Projects and Solutions in Team Foundation Server
• Ch 05 - Defining Your Branching and Merging Strategy
• Ch 06 - Managing Source Control Dependencies in Visual Studio Team System
• Ch 07 - Team Build Explained
• Ch 08 - Setting Up Continuous Integration with Team Build
• Ch 09 - Setting Up Scheduled Builds with Team Build
• Ch 10 - Large Project Considerations
• Ch 11 - Project Management Explained
• Ch 12 - Work Items Explained
• Ch 13 – MSF Agile Projects
• Ch 14 - Process Templates Explained
• Ch 15 - Reporting Explained
• Ch 16 - Team Foundation Server Deployment
• Ch 17 - Providing Internet Access to Team Foundation Server

A very interesting read which gives a nice overview of Orcas and beyond. Go to: http://reddevnews.com/features/article.aspx?editorialsid=722.

If you haven't upgraded to Office 2007 yet and have started to receive Office 2007 documents in the mail, then you will probably want to download the "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats".

This will allow you top Open, edit, and save documents, workbooks, and presentations in the file formats new to Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.

Go to: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displaylang=en

As software developers we strive to build our webapplications as robust and performant as possible. Given a server and proper bandwith connection you know all the tricks to make the application handle an optimum load of users. More often than not the server and available bandwith are a delimiting factor. Strangeloop has analysed a number of performance problems when running ASP.NET sites and offers a non-intrusive hardware solution to make your site run fast: the Strangeloop AppScaler.

So if you're interested in improving the performance of your ASP.NET site, without having to dig into the code, then the AppScaler is worth a look.

Yesterday I started converting a bunch of Visual Studio database projects (.dbp) to projects for Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals (.dbproj).

The easiest way to accomplish this and get immediate benefit from the new features of VSTS DB Pro is to make sure you have a fully up to date database, then create a new DB Pro project and use the Import Database Wizard to suck in everything from the database. A script will be created for each and every scriptable object in the database.

After having done this the Schema Compare functionality is great! Can believe I ever did anything with databases without having this tool!

Updates for DB Pro seem to come pretty fast, CTP 2 for Service Release 1 is available for download already. Watch the DataDude blog to keep informed on DB Pro.

Somasegar just announced a new tool which will allow non-software developers to develop… something. Being interested I surfed over to www.popfly.com but it would seem the site is not quite up and running.

I managed to set things up so that I can now blog from Word 2007.

The basic setup was pretty easy, thanks to dasBloggingWithWord2007.aspx">this post from Colin Neller.

Setting it up so that any pictures are also uploaded automatically took a little longer since my blog engine, dasBlog, does not support uploading pictures directly.

To prove it works… below a picture of Sophie, my 5.5 month old girlie…

At the MVP 2007 Summit Microsoft opened the Summit with a video containing pictures of lots of MVP's. Nice! Anyway, I just discovered the video is on YouTube. See below.

I recently got asked what the AutoEventWireup flag does that can be placed in the @Page directive of an ASP.NET page.

A quick Google pointed me to the blog of K. Scott Allen, who does an excellent job of describing it.

Go to: http://odetocode.com/Blogs/scott/archive/2006/02/16/2914.aspx.

Only 3 days to go until the first Code-Camp in the Netherlands.

I won't be in the Netherlands this weekend, so I'll have to miss out on the fun, but Maurice de Beijer will take good care of everyone.

More info: http://www.code-camp.nl/

Marcel de Vries has delivered a release version of his project on CodePlex in which he offers a set of Workflow activities you can use to implement service operations using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

Go to: http://blogs.infosupport.com/marcelv/archive/2007/05/08/WCF-activities-version-1.0-now-released-at-codeplex.aspx