The Bit Bucket (Greg Low): IDisposable

DevWeek in London - coming up in March - early bird ends soon

Greg Low — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 03:10:00 GMT

DevWeek is on again this year http://www.devweek.com Should be good to catch up with many of my European colleagues again. DevWeek is on March 15 - 19 at the Barbican Centre in London. The early bird pricing runs till 19th February. A number of my SolidQ...(read more)

New entry in the unbelievably-misleading error message category: Windows 7 x64 RDP Client

Greg Low — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 06:30:00 GMT

I spent quite a while earlier trying to make an RDP connection to another system on my network. The error message from the RDP client was: Your computer could not connect to another console session on the remote computer because you already have another...(read more)

Stored Procedure Contracts - Return Values

Greg Low — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 22:23:00 GMT

Yesterday's blog post on the need for contracts for stored procedures caused a lot of comments and email. One of the most interesting comments came from Jamie Thomson regarding return values. Jamie's totally correct on this. Return values should be part...(read more)

SQL Server 2008 R2: StreamInsight Development Models

Greg Low — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 02:38:00 GMT

One thing that seems confusing to people when they first look at StreamInsight is that there are several development models: 1. Implicit Server 2. Explicit Server 3. IObservable/IObserver Implicit server is fairly straightforward. You define your input...(read more)

Stored Procedures - Time for a real contract?

Greg Low — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:37:00 GMT

Increasingly, developers are using tools that try to automate code generation when dealing with databases. Stored procedures have been a thorn in the side of this. Mostly that's because it's difficult to obtain the metadata that is really needed. RowSets...(read more)

SQL Server 2008 R2 - StreamInsight - Event Payloads

Greg Low — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 02:35:00 GMT

One of the key decisions you'll make when working with StreamInsight is the payload that will be carried by each event. Events contain and EventKind (which is related to whether they're inserting a new event or modifying an existing one), some temporal...(read more)

SQL Server 2008 R2: Reporting Services - Pagination

Greg Low — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:12:00 GMT

Another item I had on the Connect site was about pagination. I wanted to be able to restart page numbering within a report. In my case, this was because I wanted to output a set of invoices in a single report but I wanted each invoice to have its own...(read more)

SQL Server 2008 R2: Reporting Services - RenderFormat

Greg Low — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:07:00 GMT

I'm really happy with the Reporting Services team. I've had a few items on Connect where I've asked for features and they've come back and said "Done!". One of these is RenderFormat. I wanted the ability to change my formatting based upon where I was...(read more)

SQL Server 2008 R2: StreamInsight Event Models - EventShapes

Greg Low — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:34:00 GMT

Continuing on the theme of describing StreamInsight, the next major concept is the Event Model. Events in StreamInsight are made up of two sets of data. One set is the basic information required by the StreamInsight engine such as when an event occurred....(read more)

SQL Server 2008 R2: What is StreamInsight used for

Greg Low — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 05:16:00 GMT

Since I posted some StreamInsight info the other day, I've had a bunch of people asking me what StreamInsight is used for. StreamInsight is Microsoft's implementation of Complex Event Processing. This is not a new market but it is new territory for Microsoft....(read more)

The Region: Sofware Industry Predictions for 2010: iPhone General-Purpose Applications

Greg Low — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 01:21:00 GMT

Our Microsoft RD lead Kevin Schuler has asked us to post predictions for 2010 that will appear in a special edition of TheRegion. (Check out www.theregion.com for any interesting blog if you haven't already). Here's mine: Against all perceived wisdom,...(read more)

Windows 7 GodMode

Greg Low — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 00:24:00 GMT

OK, I'm sure many will have already seen this but if you haven't: Create a folder in Windows 7 and rename it to: GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} Then check out it's contents. That's seriously geeky and cool. Share this post: email it! |...(read more)

SQL Server 2008 R2: StreamInsight AdvanceTimePolicy.Adjust

Greg Low — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 00:06:00 GMT

While building content for the upcoming Metro training for SQL Server 2008 R2, Bill Chesnut and I were puzzled about the Adjust option for AdvanceTimePolicy in the AdvanceTimeSettings for a stream. It was described in Books Online as causing the timestamp...(read more)

SQL Server 2008 R2 - Departmental applications?

Greg Low — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 23:53:00 GMT

One of the new items coming with SQL Server 2008 R2 and Visual Studio 2010 is the Data-Tier Application. It is designed for (what are described as) departmental applications. What a "deparmental" application is deserves some thought. Mostly it relates...(read more)

StreamInsight and Reactive Extensions to .NET

Greg Low — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:48:00 GMT

I've been doing a lot of work lately with StreamInsight, coming in SQL Server 2008 R2. There are three development models you can use with StreamInsight: Implicit Server, Explicit Server and IObservable/IObserver. When I was working through material on...(read more)