Microsoft Demos SQL Server 2008
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The next version of the database should be shipped on the three-year refresh schedule.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for SQL Server 2005 on Tuesday, a free upgrade available for download, in addition to new virtualization licensing for the database.
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Users and developers anxious to get their hands on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 will have wait a little longer. Since early this year Microsoft said to expect the finished version of the product in the first half of 2005.
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(InfoWorld) - Although Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008 software development platform is part of a February 2008 multiproduct launch, the company intends to ship it by the end of 2007, said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog. The company earlier this week announced that a launch event on February 27, 2008, would feature Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008. This revelation, made at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, came after Microsoft had said Visual Studio 2008 was targeted to ship later this year. But Microsoft is still anticipating a 2007 release, Somasegar said. "While we will be launching our products together in February, we are still aiming to release Visual Studio 2008 and .Net FX (.Net Framework) 3.5 by the end of this year based on your feedback so far," Somaseger said. A Microsoft representative elaborated on the plan. "It is Microsoft's desire to ship Visual Studio 2008 by the end of this calendar year (although, as always, customer feedback ultimately determines when a product is ready to ship)," the representative said in an e-mail. "The February launch event is more of an opportunity to show customers, partners, and the community the wave of innovation Microsoft is delivering with all three products represented (i.e. Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008)."Â  Formerly code-named Orcas, Visual Studio 2008 has been geared to development of Web applications, as well as for Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system. A second beta release of Visual Studio 2008 has been expected for later this summer. At the conference, Microsoft also announced that its Software Licensing and Protection Services products are due in the October time frame. The product suite features tools to help developers, including ISVs, protect intellectual property, build and license product versions, track product and feature usage, and integrate into back-end processes, Microsoft said. Featuring the Secured Dimensions technology that Microsoft acquired in January, the suite includes: * Code Protector SDK, a software development toolkit for protecting and transforming managed or .Net code; developers can mark features as licensable entities. * Software Licensing and Protection Server, enabling ISVs to host their own servers and create licenses for products. * SLP Online Server, for partners to conduct license management without hosting their own servers.Â
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Alex Netkachov has posted some of his own thoughts about Microsoft's recent SQL server 205 driver for PHP:   I can add that a few years ago I had bad experience with MS SQL PHP extension. It was just impossible to use it in production environment. These days MS understand that PHP is a very popular programming language and step forward to the community   He also includes a list of some of the things that the driver includes/makes possible such as the fact that it's not a PDO or OOP driver, that there's no source posted for it and that it does support data streams.
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ON THE SCENE - If you follow the crowd at TechEd, eventually they'll lead you to what's truly important.  So in the wake of some schedule changes here this morning, we let the crowd lead us to what turned out to be one of the more significant demos here:  Microsoft product manager Dan Harmon showed off the new Server Manager that downloaders of Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 are seeing for the first time.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft revealed the official names Monday of the next major upgrades to its Visual Studio software development tools platform and its SQL Server database, which will be called, simply, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008.
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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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Go directly to the back-end database to optimize query processing. Bill Pearson leads a hands-on introduction to implementing Pass-Through queries to MSSQL Server 2000 from an MS Access client.
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To help ensure that Windows Server 2008 won't lack for compatible software, Microsoft released a beta version of a tool that can check whether applications will work with the upcoming OS.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft revealed the official names Monday of the next major upgrades to its Visual Studio software development tools platform and its SQL Server database, which will be called, simply, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. The company announced these names during the Microsoft TechEd 2007 conference in Orlando, Fla., which began on Monday. The Visual Studio upgrade had been codenamed "Orcas," while SQL Server has had the "Katmai" code name. Visual Studio 2008 is due for general release at the end of 2007, said Steve Guggenheimer, general manager of the applications platform at Microsoft. A second beta release of the product is due later this summer, featuring Visual Studio Shell, which enables developers to build and distribute custom tools built on the Visual Studio IDE. A first beta was released on April 26. The Visual Studio upgrade focuses on development of Web-based applications as well as on Windows and Microsoft's Office suite, Guggenheimer said. "This release is very much oriented toward supporting the Vista and Office release as well as the Longhorn Server release," of Windows, said Guggenheimer. The company announced in May that Longhorn will be called Windows Server 2008; it, too, is due later this year. Even though it will ship in 2007, the Visual Studio upgrade will bear 2008 in its nameplate because that is when Microsoft expects most people will buy it, Guggenheimer said. SQL Server 2008, meanwhile, will ship around the middle of 2008; a first Community Technology Preview was made available at TechEd, accessible here. The new database will offer improvements for enterprise scalability and business intelligence, including reporting technology from Dundas Data Visualization. Microsoft announced its acquisition of Dundas products on Monday morning. Microsoft at TechEd also said it has released Community Technology Previews for BizTalk Services, which is a hosted offering to enable SOA across the Internet, and the .Net Framework 3.5. The framework includes Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation technology for Web services, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, and CardSpace, for digital identities. Microsoft has said .Net Framework 3.5 will feature improvements in scalability, performance, and the Common Language Runtime. Microsoft also reported it will deliver BizTalk Server 2006 R2, for business process management, in the third quarter of this year, featuring RFID infrastructure, native support for EDI, and technologies to integrate .Net Framework 3.0, the 2007 Microsoft Office System, and Windows Vista. Beta 2 of the product is available now. Also at TechEd, presentation layer development tools maker Infragistics announced its NetAdvantage for WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) software will support Visual Studio 2008. This NetAdvantage product provides user interface controls to work with WPF. Also, Infragistics is working on Project Aikido, which is a series of ASP.Net server controls for Web 2.0 applications. Aikido leverages technologies such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), HTML and Cascading Style Sheets. Infragistics also will show prototype controls geared to work with Microsoft's Silverlight 1.1 multimedia display technology. Featured as part of the company's NetAdvantage for Silverlight product, controls have been built for charting, image scrolling and scroll panel, which contains UI elements such as button. Parasoft at TechEd announced the upcoming release of Parasoft Test 4.0, intended to help development teams boost productivity on the Microsoft .Net Framework. Parasoft 4.0 automates best practices intended to increase development team productivity and software quality. Test ensures that .Net code works as expected by enabling coding policy enforcement, static analysis and unit testing. Featured in Version 4.0 is a streamlined manual code review process. Also featured is Bug Detective, for static code analysis to identify paths that could trigger runtime defects. A Code Review module in Version 4.0 automates the code review process. This module benefits distributed development teams who cannot logistically participate in physical code review sessions, Parasoft said.
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SQL Server 2005 offers compelling reasons to embrace the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform for information needs across your enterprise. This paper explains the extensive feature set from the perspective of business value. It will help you make informed decisions about upgrading or migrating your business intelligence platform to SQL Server 2005.
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On tap for the new database management system: improvements in high availability, performance, scalability, manageability and what Oracle dubs "diagnosability."
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With Windows Vista already a firmly entrenched product in many homes and some businesses, and with Windows Server 2008 cruising toward a final release in the second half of this year, Microsoft may feel it's time for its many partners and developers with an interest in Windows' success to stand and deliver.  Will they be willing to make changes in their development strategies?  We may find out next week at TechEd 2007 in Orlando.
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Attendees at the Microsoft 2008 Office System Developer Conference this week are leveraging development capabilities in Office System, but cite issues such as getting used to the new ribbon-based Fluent UI in the 2007 Office release.A sampling of attendees at the San Jose, Calif. event revealed mostly satisfaction with Office System. Most were Microsoft business partners developing applications for Microsoft's SharePoint platform for collaboration and business processes."I bought into it. I'm drinking the KoolAid," said Jeff Modzel, technical architect for SunGard Higher Education."Our customers are colleges and universities and their constituents, which are students. Kids very much want collaborative environments for their classes. SharePoint's an easy solution to that problem," Modzel said.He described Office System as an "excellent" development platform, although he noted difficulties in writing an Excel 2007 add-in prior to getting the newly released Visual Studio 2008 platform.The new ribbon-based Fluent UI in the Office package takes some getting used to, Modzel said. "The first handful of times I used it, I did not like it and the more I used it the more I liked it," he said.Consultants at developer OTB Solutions also mentioned issues with the ribbon. The people who hate it the most are the people who are very familiar with the old Office platform, said Dick Federle, consultant at OTB.? But he still likes the feature. "The neat thing about the ribbon is since it?s context-sensitive, you're only seeing what's important for what you're looking at, at the time, said Federle.Another consultant at OTB gave the ribbon a thumbs-up. "It's become familiar. You can use it and extend it," said OTB consultant Jen Glass.OTB has been using SharePoint as an application development platform. "We saw with the new SharePoint platform that it was actually ready for enterprise applications," Federle said. For example, OTB has developed a health insurance claims auditing system that processes more than 1.5 million transactions a month, he said.Developers, though, must adapt to using configuration capabilities in SharePoint rather than resort to coding, Federle said. "There are a lot of capabilities and a lot of problems you can solve with SharePoint through configuration without having to write any code," he said.At FirstBank, the company is currently running Office XP and is looking to migrate to Visual Studio Tools for Office and Office 2007, said Greg Mestas, distributed applications manager at the company.While features such as the ribbon UI in Office 2007 may make things easier for developers, Mestas is not so sure what the benefit is for end users."Most of our people use Word and Excel, and Word and Excel are still Word and Excel," Mestas said. "They've had a lot of the same features release over release. So the biggest benefit for us [in migrating] is staying on a supported platform, to put it bluntly," he said.The bank is starting a pilot project on SharePoint for office automation. "We're trying to get rid of all that paper and all that manual process and create some workflows and InfoPath forms as a replacement," Mestas said.An official at SharePoint applications developer Consejo applauded Microsoft's Open XML document initiative as a benefit for Office application development."Their whole Open XML is proving to be very comforting to most developers because in the old days, when it was binary, that not necessarily ideal," said Virgil Pate, development manager at Consejo.Also, the ribbon UI makes it simpler to modify the user interface, he said. But Microsoft could have done a better job in migrating users to the ribbon, Pate stressed.Recalling his company's experience with SharePoint, Pate said it is easy to get started developing extensions, but support has been slow, he said.Pate expressed caution about the Office Live platform, in which Microsoft offers online versions of software. While calling Office Live a great idea, Pate wondered about its security and reliability. "If they ever start to go down or start to have lag time, it's going to hurt them," he said.Another developer, Marcin Geborik, of developer Computer Plus of Krakow, Poland, cited good experiences in developing for SharePoint but found difficulty in working with Microsoft Office Project Server."As a matter of fact, Project Server's API is just not good," Geborik said.Meanwhile, Microsoft with version 2 of Office Live Small Business this week restructured the offering, providing users with a free domain for the first year as well as a free Web site. After the first year, the domain costs $14.95.?Subscribers get 100 free e-mail accounts each with 2-2.5GB of storage, as well as services such as contact management.Also, Microsoft with its Unified Communications platform plans to bulk it up with instant messaging capabilities that can find persons linked in a workflow chain.
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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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Released to manufacturing Microsoft this morning released Service Pack 1 for Vista and Windows Server 2008 to manufacturers.â¦