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Via an interesting article from Joe Celko on bad practices in database design and the horrors of EAV (Entity-Attribute-Value) tables, there is a link to a great read on the ultimate ‘One table to Rule Them All’!  I find this tale very pertinent as I once did a short stint at a company with ‘start’ in their name, that had created a design with a single table for static data (although no where near as bad as the one described in ‘Bad CaRMa’).

Dave Thomas, a popular speaker and agile proponent has kindly agreed to present 2 talks in Perth. He is a founding director of the Agile Alliance and is a Managing Director for Object Mentor a leader in XP, Craftmanship and Lean and Agile in the Large.  Dave is doing the opening keynote for the Agile 2010 Conference.

YOW! Night: An Evening For Software Professionals
Sponsored by Perth.NET and YOW! Developer Conference Australia (formerly known as JAOO)

In recognition of the importance of active software professionals who always seek improvement – YOW! Australia in cooperation with IBM, and your local user groups is pleased to invite you to join us for YOW! Nights. Hear great YOW! speakers and network with other software professionals.

Provisional Schedule of Events (Thurs, 30th Sept)

5.30pm – 5.45pm  Doors Open

5.45pm – 6.45pm  Presentation #1 Envisioning Backlogs

6.45pm – 7.00pm Quick Break

7.00pm – 8.00pm Presentation #2 Functional Programming and NoSQL Data

8.00pm –  Q & A

This event requires registration as we expect places to fill up fast. Please register here

Please Note: Venue has changed to:

Enex100 Seminar Room, Level 3, Enex100, 100 St Georges Terrace

• TOPIC: Test Driven Development (TDD) – the Agile Perspective on Testing
• DATE:   Thursday, Sept 2nd, 5:30pm – 7:00pm
• VENUE: Enex100 Seminar Room, Level 3, 100 St Georges Terrace, Perth
• COST:   Free. All welcome

In this talk, we will look at how the discipline of being Test-Driven in an agile environment creates a before/just-in-time testing regime that drives the rest of the development (requirements, design and implementation). TDD is key to both optimizing (read eliminating) other “traditional” development techniques such as requirements specifications, design documents, etc as well as enabling other agile best practices such as short-iterations, architectural spikes and refactoring. We will look at the approach and what you need (people/roles, tools, process, mind-set, etc) to support this approach.

Ola Hallengren has released an updated version of his free and very useful SQL Server maintenance scripts
New additions include:

• A new version of IndexOptimize with support for advanced index selection. In the new version you can select indexes in the same way as you can do with databases. You can select individual or lists of schemas, objects or indexes, use exclusions or use wild-cards.
• Support for HyperBac backup compression and backup description in DatabaseBackup.

He has also posted online documentation, including a Getting Started Guide, an Upgrading Guide and Frequently Asked Questions.

Very interesting recent post from Brad McGehee on RedGate’s Virtual Restore which enables you to “Rapidly mount live, fully functional databases direct from backups”:

In brief, what SQL Virtual Restore does is to mount a SQL Server backup to a SQL Server instance as a fully functional, live database. In other words, the mounted database works exactly like any other database from SQL Server’s perspective, except the data, for the most part, is stored in a backup file

This has many uses, as Brad mentions in his post.

The development landscape is so rich (or perhaps it is my age!), that I find myself forgetting about useful resources (hence this blog). One I had overlooked recently is the TechNet Script Center (note US spelling), and specifically the SQL Server area.

Don’t forget: meeting tonight. Ola Karlsson is presenting on Microsoft Smooth Streaming.  We have several Tekpub 30-day coupons and a JetBrains license as door prizes!

Saw this in a question on one of the StackOverflow family of sites today: Google Search Cheat Sheet

I never knew about the synonym operator ‘~’ !

Microsoft have just released Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0, a new and long awaited process template for Team Foundation Server 2010.  It can be downloaded from the Visual Studio Gallery or via the Visual Studio Extension Manager. 

In this presentation we’ll look at how you can leverage tools like Microsoft Smooth Streaming, IIS, Silverlight and Expression Encoder to get a simple video player up and running in minutes and start delivering a great online video experience. We’ll also look at ways of creating your own fully customised player, including using the Microsoft backed open source project, Silverlight Media Framework (SMF).

Smooth Streaming and SMF use industry best practices and have been used for events such as the NBC 2010 Winter Olympics and the Tour de France on French Télévision. Smooth streaming provides features like near instant video start, very fast seeking and eliminating that irritating “buffering” we see all too often when watching online video.

• TOPIC: Microsoft Smooth streaming – with Ola Karlsson
• DATE: Thursday, Aug 5th, 5:30pm – 7:00pm
• VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
• COST: Free. All welcome

Ola Karlsson works as a full time Silverlight and ASP.Net developer and has been working with Microsoft Smooth Streaming since it was released in early 2009. Ola is an active member of the Australian Silverlight community, having spoken at the at the first Australian Silverlight Code Camp, which was held in Melbourne February 2010 and he is a frequent speaker at the Perth, Silverlight Developer Designer Network (SDDN).

There will be a door prize of a choice of license from JetBrains (one of ReSharper , TeamCity Build Agent, dotTrace Profiler, RubyMine, IntelliJ IDEA), and several 30-day coupons to Tekpub‘s high-quality, online screencasts for programmers.