Community developer blogs

Dave Oliver

Recent Posts

• Free SQL Server 2008 Developer Training Kit!

  Posted: 13 Jun 2009 at 16:12 by Dave Oliver

  Continuing my series of great free stuff for SQL Server I’ve pulled a rabbit out of the hat for you today! In this economic climate one of the first things that seems to get cut is the training budget so anything that can help get your head around stuff is a big plus. To help Microsoft has released SQL Server 2008 Developer Training Kit So what does the Training Kit contain …   Presentations (6) Filestream Spatial T-SQL Date and Time Types SQLCLR Reporting Services Demos (12)

• A very good Free SQL Server Utility : FineBuild

  Posted: 09 Jun 2009 at 20:24 by Dave Oliver

  Codeplex is a wonderful site. However not just for the .Net coder but the SQL Server guy/gal can find plenty of goodies there as well. One such goody is the FineBuild utility that does as the name suggest helps create a ‘Fine Build’ of your SQL Server install. All to often installing SQL Server can turn into a day long process with the various additional service packs, CU’s, tools and utility to install.

• A Week with Bing

  Posted: 09 Jun 2009 at 19:47 by Dave Oliver

  As promised, what is my verdict after using BingUK for a week? To be perfectly honest it’s been distinctly unremarkable … and this is a good thing for Microsoft! BingUK is lacking the killer features that the US version has, the ‘get out’ for the UK version is that it’s still in Beta and will be for sometime. So perhaps BingUK is still more of a search engine than a decision engine at the moment. So how does it compare with Google?

• Free eBook on what’s new in SQL Server 2008

  Posted: 07 Jun 2009 at 10:18 by Dave Oliver

  It’s not often we get stuff for free but Microsoft has decided to give away a complete book, not just afew sample chapters. All you have to do is go to this link , press the ‘Sign Up’ button, leave some details about yourself, if you’ve registered with MSDN before it’ll just pick up you existing details and then pdf will download. So what’s the catch?

• The Sound of Found : Bing!

  Posted: 01 Jun 2009 at 17:55 by Dave Oliver

  Microsoft have completely re-written Live Search, the new offering Bing! Bing is being marketed as a ‘decision engine’ as it tries to workout what you are looking for rather always giving the top ranking website out of an algorithm. Microsoft has commissioned allot of research to work out what people are actually trying to do for when they use a search engine. It is clear Microsoft cannot ‘out search’ Google but could gain market share by finding an edge and that edge is adding more depth.

• SQL Server 2008 R2

  Posted: 26 May 2009 at 22:05 by Dave Oliver

  R2 ! As you may know I’m abit of a SQL Server nut so I was particularly interested in the announcement at the recent TechEd of SQL Server 2008 R2. R2 is the combination of the Kilimanjaro, Madison and Gemini projects. Kilimanjaro is adding support for up to 256 processors to the existing code base. Whilst Madison follows on from the purchase of DataAllegro last year moving data to handling petabytes of data.

• The Trouble With Data …

  Posted: 26 May 2009 at 21:28 by Dave Oliver

• Do CEOs *Really* care about IT?

  Posted: 23 May 2009 at 09:09 by Dave Oliver

  “CEOs don’t pay attention to technology unless something breaks down” according to Jim Champy, Chairman of Consulting for Perot Systems. Michael Krigsman of ZDNET has written about this experiences at this weeks MIT CIO Symposium on a panel discussing ‘Aligning Business with IT’ here. Michael draws the conclusion that improving integration between IT and business requires focus and collaborative effort from both CEO and CIO.

• Eileen Brown

  Posted: 09 May 2009 at 10:26 by Dave Oliver

  I was extremely sadden to hear the news that Eileen Brown’s role at Microsoft was at risk of redundancy as part of the second round of layoff at Microsoft. I do sincerely hope that Eileen finds another role soon. I’m also amazed that this has happen to Eileen as she is such an ambassador for Microsoft in not just IT Pro and Connecting Women in IT but has been instrumental in linking people from outside Microsoft to the right people inside Microsoft which as anyone knows who deals with Microsoft

• Microsoft’s UK Architecture Resources

  Posted: 09 May 2009 at 09:17 by Dave Oliver

  To Microsoft’s credit their Architecture resources are much improving. The excellent free Architecture Journal and the MSDN Architecture Centre have been going for sometime but I noticed recently that there is a new UK centric Architecture Portal written by the UK DPE Architect Team with the new free monthly Arc Magazine. The first editions of the Arc Magazine tackle the highly logical new buzz ‘Software + Services’ with links to the Microsoft Strategy Software + Services Home Page.

• What is all the fuss about Cloud Computing?

  Posted: 07 Apr 2009 at 19:36 by Dave Oliver

  Cloud computing is the buzzword of the moment .  It seems that applying the "cloud" label is a real desire for a lot of people out there in the marketplace.  This of course leads to the arguments about whether the "cloud" label is appropriate or just marketing spin. Why on earth is Cloud Computing so appealing? I think there are a lot of factors.  I'll outline a few of the main ones below … Trendy To a certain extent delivering a cloud solution suggests that organisations are on the cutting e

• Laptop Logic in the Enterprise

  Posted: 04 Apr 2009 at 09:24 by Dave Oliver

  Laptops are the client machine of choice in the Enterprise. They are an essential component of modern business allowing the workforce to turn almost anywhere into an office and place of business. In the Enterprise the laptop will steadily taken over the place of many desktops in business, there will be a place for them in static workforces but for everyone else it will be the default device. Because laptops play such an important role in the Enterprise, no Enterprise Technology blog would be any

• Well Blogging From The iPhone Works

  Posted: 04 Apr 2009 at 07:54 by Dave Oliver

  As you can guess from the title I have written this post completely on my iPhone.A part from the obvious restrictions, such as the small keyboard, it wasn't a wholly unpleasant experience making the whole notion of using a device like this to construct posts a viable option.What put me off attempting to do this before was indeed screen-size but the iPhone does just about cross the boundary in a useable experience.So I'm a little late to the iPhone party with all the fuss happening last year but

• TOGAF 9 is now available !

  Posted: 05 Feb 2009 at 19:49 by Dave Oliver

  There really has never been a better time to get into Enterprise Architecture as the global economic downturn means that smart companies will be looking at making efficiency savings through strategic implementations and process streamlining, identification of function duplication and better IT/business alignment. Enterprise Architecture is a hard thing to get off the ground so why try and re-invent the wheel and benefit from the experiences of others in many different organisations. Using a fram

• Yesterday's Google Outage Was Cause by Basic Errors.

  Posted: 01 Feb 2009 at 11:26 by Dave Oliver

  Google's 40 minute outage, which I reported, was caused by 'human error' according to a report by the BBC. Reading the account it seemed that several basic tasks weren't done. 1) The Live site is not checked after updates are performed on it 2) The risk that incorrectly updating the Stopbadware.org list file was something that could stop the site from working properly was not identified. 3) The site is not very regularly checked to see if it still working properly Any Web-Master will tell you t

• Google Is Having Issues!

  Posted: 31 Jan 2009 at 15:26 by Dave Oliver

  I notices that all my searches on google where coming up with ... "This site may harm your computer" message. So, I got Google to do a search on itself and this is the result ... The BBC has now picked up the issues ...  http://tinyurl.com/acbvaq.   Hmmm, this does make you think about Cloud Computing and the importance of getting a decent SLA !

• Why is Windows 7 Beta so Good? -And Why You are Less Likely to Care!

  Posted: 28 Jan 2009 at 23:44 by Dave Oliver

  I, like many others, download Windows 7 Beta build 7000 on the day it hit MSDN after reading about its availability from Bink.nu. It came as an ISO so was easy to build into a virtual machine however on my home laptop I've partitioned my HDD and had XP in one partition and Vista in the other. Vista rarely gets to see the light of day simple because it is always doing something with the hard-disk! Checking! Scanning! Indexing! All driving me nuts as it slows down the performance of my machine. So

• A Developers Guide to Servers. What you need to know but were afraid to ask.

  Posted: 24 Jan 2009 at 12:24 by Dave Oliver

  Servers are the backbone of enterprise computing today, most websites for example run on either Apache or IIS and will be running on a server of some description. Perhaps because of servers ubiquity it is easy to become complacent about them especially as they are rarely seen but understanding what a server can offer you and it's limitations will definitely help with software development. Servers on the whole are built more of the practicality side than for the esthetics, there is no need to ma

• A Developers Guide to Storage. What you need to know but were afraid to ask.

  Posted: 30 Dec 2008 at 12:03 by Dave Oliver

  Does your software or database run like a dog? Running out of space? Or doesn't recover well in a disaster? ... then your storage configuration may be one of the reasons. This is a short little post just to give you a heads-up on the basics. You may know bits of it already, hence why I have broken it up into a Q&A format so you can skip what you already now. The Hard-Disk Well we've all seen a hard-disk but the likelihood is that it was in a desktop and you're the only person that uses i

• Infrastructure Appreciation for Developers.

  Posted: 30 Dec 2008 at 11:55 by Dave Oliver

  Hardware and Software are very much the modern day Yin and Yang, one serves little purpose without the other. I have noticed that on the whole many developers know little about the environments that the software they are writing is going to work in falsely believing they are truly abstracted from it . Come 'Go Live' there are blank faces when for some 'inexplicably reason' the software doesn't work and the remark, 'it worked fine in test' is often heard. Another common frustration is software t