Visual Studio beats SQL Server in 2008 stakes
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Chihuahua-sized bark Microsoft's Visual Studio team has put the database division to shame. Days after Microsoft slipped out the news that the update to SQL Server will not be ready in time for next month's big-dog release event, Visual Studio 2008 has been released commercially - ahead of time.â¦
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Microsoft Corp. released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for SQL Server 2005 on Tuesday, a free upgrade [&lt;a href="http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/servicepacks/sp2.mspx"&gt;available for download&lt;/a&gt;], in addition to new virtualization licensing for the database.
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Microsoft is taking a new approach to product launches it seems, announcing it would release SQL Server 2008 to manufacturing in the second quarter of 2008, months after the product is supposed to officially "launch" alongside Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 on February 27.
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Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) has announced that the shipping date for SQL Server 2005 has been delayed -- a development bound to prompt an outcry from users anticipating what is the pivotal product in Microsoft's server portfolio.
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The most advanced, fully featured, stable, Open Source SQL-compliant database server available, bar none.   Today the PostgreSQL Global Development Group releases the long-awaited version 8.3 of the most advanced open source database, which cements our place as the best performing open source database. Among the performance features you'll be excited about in 8.3 are:      * Heap Only Tuples     * BGWriter Autotuning     * Asynchronous Commit     * Spread Checkpoints     * Synchronous Scan     * "Var-Varlena"     * L2 Cache Protection     * Lazy XID   8.3 also has a lot of cool features for PostgreSQL DBAs and developers, including:      * CSV Logging     * SQL/XML     * MS Visual C++ support     * ENUMs     * Integrated Tsearch     * SSPI & GSSAPI     * Composite Type Arrays     * pg_standby   There are many, many other features included in this release. Visit the features list and the features matrix for more information, and browse the release notes to see the more than 300 patches that went into the release. You can even visit the press page.  Or just go ahead and download and install 8.3:  http://www.postgresql.org/ftp   All of the more than 200 contributors to 8.3 are excited and relieved to deliver this version after 15 months of work. Upgrade, and enjoy the new features and faster performance!
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Microsoft's chief operating officer says that Windows Server 2008--formerly code-named Longhorn Server--will be launched next February along with upgrades of SQL Server and Visual Studio.
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Open source data integration vendor Talend has been working with Microsoft to build better interoperability between Talend&#39;s Open Studio product and Microsoft&#39;s business software, Talend said Tuesday.Open Studio is an ETL (extract, transform, and load) tool that has been downloaded more than 150,000 times, according to Talend. The company also makes an on-demand version of the product, and an Integration Suite for use by teams.While Open Studio already worked with SQL Server, the new work will result in compatibility with Microsoft&#39;s business applications, including Dynamics AX, Dynamics NAV, Dynamics CRM, and Dynamics GP, according to Yves de Montcheuil, Talend&#39;s vice president of marketing. It will also enable Open Studio to work with SQL Server 2008, which is set to launch in February.De Montcheuil said Microsoft approached his company first&#160;and offered technical support to help create the new interoperability. The entreaty ties into&#160;Microsoft&#39;s recent efforts to engage the open source community, with which it has had a decidedly mixed relationship.Microsoft, of course, has developed its own ETL tools for years, from the earlier Data Transformation Services to the more recent&#160;Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services.&#160;DTS was &quot;very rough and very basic,&quot; de Montcheuil said, adding that MSIS &quot;made a significant leap forward.&quot; Still, he argued, &quot;It&#39;s probably well-suited for people who are in a pure Microsoft environment.&quot;In contrast, Talend targets customers with highly heterogeneous environments. &quot;We know information systems are a composite of technologies,&quot; he said. &quot;No company is homogeneous.&quot;
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Microsoft (Quote, Chart) has released its second Community Technology Preview (CTP) for SQL Server 2005, adding greater performance and 64-bit support for SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services and SQL Server 2005 Integration Services.
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An early version of the first significant Vista update is released to about 12,000 testers. Meanwhile, a near-final "release candidate" version of Windows Server 2008 is set to be available for download within 24 hours.
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Solves several key developer problems It's been a long time coming - but the much-anticipated proper release of Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008 could make it to market before the end of the year. Officially the Visual Studio 2008 is slated to be part of a massive Microsoft product launch at the end of February 2008. But there has been talk that it will arrive earlier.â¦
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Blog: The database software maker has a new version out that can talk to other databases written in SQL.
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Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 could now be released in March or April of next year.
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Microsoft has released another interim version of its forthcoming SQL Server 2005 database and has introduced a free management tool.
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The 2008 Microsoft Office System Developer Conference this week focuses on the company's Office application suite as an application development platform in and of itself.The event in San Jose, Calif. features a presentation by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and is the first time it has been held away from the company's Redmond, Wash. campus."We are holding the first open-to-the-public Office developer conference," said Chris Bryant, Microsoft senior product manager in the Office platform strategy group. When previously held in 2005 and 2006, the event was invitation-only."We decided it was time to reach out broadly," to the public, said Bryant. The company estimates that approximately 45 percent of developers worldwide do development work related to the Office platform, he said.At the event, Gates will give a keynote presentation featuring a guest from FedEx, David Zanca, senior vice president for e-commerce technologies, who will show how FedEx is extending Office with custom interfaces.?FedEx will launch FedEx QuickShip, an add-in for Microsoft Outlook. With the add-in, users can create a FedEx shipping order from within Outlook. The shipping form is pre-populated with contact information.Microsoft will make several announcements at the show. The company will launch version 2 of its OBA (Office Business Applications) Sample Kit for SAP, which lets developers build an Office business application that uses SAP as a back-end data source. Version 2 features compatibility with the newly released Visual Studio 2008 development toolset. Also, the company will offer OBA Sample Kit for PeopleSoft to connect to PeopleSoft data sources. Both the PeopleSoft and SAP kits are free.Another product, Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 1.1, a free download from MSDN that adds SharePoint project types to Visual Studio, Bryant said. Developers can build a Web part or a workflow. New project types are featured, including the ability to build a SharePoint site template from an existing SharePoint site. Developers can build an application on a SharePoint site and redeploy it to other SharePoint instances.The company will release to manufacturing its BizTalk Adapter Pack. "They are data source adapters for Oracle, SAP, and Siebel," for exposing those data sources as Web services and connecting them to SharePoint, said Bryant. The product, to be globally available March 1, presents a more unified data connectivity layer on top of different data sources, he said. This product is expected to cost $5,000 per processor.Another product on tap from Microsoft is OBA Component Library for Financial Services, also a free product. "It's a set of more than 100 standards-based components that allow developers to build Office business applications in the financial sector," said Bryant. New reference and sample applications will be offered in such spaces as insurance packaging and capital market packaging.?Microsoft will debut the Winter 2008 release of the online Office Office Live Small Business, which will be version 2 of the service. With this release, Microsoft will offer a base, free offering and then sell additional services, such as extra storage or mail boxes. A small business would get a Web site and the opportunity to have a domain name and a set of e-mail boxes, Bryant said."Customer feedback has essentially told [Microsoft] that the packaging options [were] not as granular as people want," said Bryant.The company will announce its Metro program for Unified Communications, which will have developer evangelists engaging ISV partners to build unified communications-enabled applications such as ones incorporating speech into applications. Microsoft will seek ISV partners for this program.FedEx also will show proof of concept applications to deepen its connection to Office, including a connection between FedEx Kinkos printing services and Microsoft Word. Users would be able to choose professional printing options and select a local FedEx Kinkos office where they could pick up their order.Also planned by FedEx is a link with SharePoint pertaining to shipping and an integration with Word in which the Office ribbon is customized for access to binding, stapling, and collating.
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On February 27, 2008, Microsoft will jointly release Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008, kicking off what it calls a "launch wave" with hundreds of events worldwide. Microsoft will pitch the products as a platform for next-generation Web service applications.
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(InfoWorld) - Looking to assist developers in building business applications, Microsoft published a second beta version of ADO.Net Entity Framework this week and a community technology preview of tools to work with the framework. The goal of the ADO.Net Entity Framework is to eliminate the impedance mismatch between data models and languages, saving developers from having to deal with these. An example of such a mismatch is objects and relational stores. Automation of complex processes is critical to the framework. "Today, when a developer builds an application, they have to write code that fills in the gaps between the way the data is stored in however many databases they interact with and the way they want to manipulate the data in their application," said Britt Johnston, product manager for data programmability tools at Microsoft. "Generally, what they do is create an object model that they write their code against." Developers might write an application that manipulates a CRM system with data for customers stored in 12 different tables, said Johnston. "With the Entity Framework, you can automate the process essentially of bringing all that data together and presenting it to the developer as a single entity so they can interact with it at a higher level of abstraction," Johnston said. Key new features in the framework beta release include events to customize code generation; complex programming types and entity key serialization. A key is a unique identifier for an entity, such as a customer ID. Metadata annotations and better support for LINQ (Language Integrated Query) also are included. LINQ features extensions to the .Net Framework to encompass language-integrated data query, set, and transform operations. Developers can access the framework on Microsoft's Web site. ADO.Net Entity Framework is due for general release as part of .Net Framework 3.5 in early-2008. Most would get it as part of an operating system update. The ADO.Net Entity Framework Tools Community Technology Preview for August features an early version of the ADO.Net Entity Designer, enabling users to visually design model and mappings using the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 release. The tools preview is accessible on Microsoft's download page with the tools to be part of Visual Studio 2008. With the framework, developers could focus on the needs of an application instead of the complexities of bridging disparate data representations. The framework consists of a data model and design-time and run-time services that allow developers to describe application data and interact with it in a conceptual level of abstraction appropriate for business applications, according to the company. This helps isolate the application from underlying logical database schemas.
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Microsoft will announce Thursday morning the release of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. According to Scott Guthrie, the general manager of Microsoft's Developer Division, the release will be nearly feature complete  and will likely be the last major release before the product is released to manufacturing in preparation for its launch on February 27, 2008.