The newly formed Boise SQL Server User Group kicks off its first meeting with Kalen Delaney on June 25, 2008. I'm happy to see a Microsoft SQL Server user group in Boise. It will fit nicely with the other development and SharePoint groups in town. For more information, contact Cindy Gross of Microsoft.

It's generally known that if you want to run any tests, code analysis, or database project build/deployment that you need to install one or more Team Edition of VSTS on your build server. What's not so well known are the licensing ramifications around these scenarios. Fortunately Jeff Beehler, Team System Chief of Staff, has posted on ...

Back home now, and I have a moment to get the photos downloaded from my camera and uploaded to my blog. Next time I'll take my SD card reader with me. As you can see, registration was quite busy. I heard that there were 4000 people there, but didn't count them myself. The long lines delayed the keynote by about an hour: ...

In this, my first post of (hopefully) several today, I'm sitting in the keynote session (next to Douglas McDowell), listening to Tom Brokaw warm up the audience. What a nice surprise. It definitely stopped all the geeks in their tracks, to listen to his wise words, gathered from years of experience in all matters mankind. I ...

Time flies. It's been a year since Dr. Gray, a Microsoft research fellow and Turing Award-winner, went missing while sailing off San Francisco. A year ago, at Boise Code Camp 2.0, I hosted a session on finding Jim Gray, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Now, a year after Dr. Gray went missing, the Association of Computing Machinery ...

I know. I know. This doesn't sound like a very interesting post, but it saved me time, and hopefully it can save you some too. When you install Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft creates a ''Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt'' shortcut, under that program group. I like to take this shortcut and drop it on my Quick Launch ...

I've been so involved with the VSTS RTM yesterday, that I almost didn't notice this one. Click here to download the latest SQL Server 2008 Community Technology Preview (CTP) and try out the latest features of SQL Server 2008.

It seems that the US Tech-Ed is following Europe's lead, by breaking up the one large conference into two: one for developers and one for IT professionals. June 3-6, 2008 - Developers (developers, solution architects, designers, and testers) June 10-13, 2008 - IT Professionals Both events will have a similar format with the ...

I just came across this download at Microsoft. It provides an introduction to the concepts and step by step instructions for creating and customizing TFS reports. The zip file contains instructional PDF documents as well as several sample reports.

Way to go Microsoft, and SQL Server 2005! For the first time in the report’s history, Microsoft is positioned in the Leader quadrant in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse DBMS. The analysts say that SQL Server 2005 is expected to grow in the data warehouse space and Microsoft’s vision for SQL Server 2008 makes clear the ...