SQL Server, performance, data, analytics
admin A short while ago I blogged about Brad McGehee’s free book from red-gate. He has recently made another available, discussing what he feels are the top ten new features of SQL Server 2008. This 112 page free book is available here. (Once again, the single, zipped download contains all 3 of the free ebooks).
I mentioned Brad’s short roundup up of new SQL Server 2008 features here.
Google have just released the Beta of their anticipated new Web browser, Chrome. It can be downloaded from www.google.com/chrome. Early reports suggest that it doesn’t yet work that well with Gmail!
Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, Sept 4th to hear Bill Poole talk about Federated Identity Management in a Service Oriented World. Gone are the days of siloed applications that identify users with a simple username/password combination stored in the application database. In today’s world of Internet based e-commerce where secure transactions occur over insecure open networks and in a service oriented world of composite applications where identity must be shared between systems hosted by different organisations on disparate platforms; in a world where increasing numbers of businesses are turning to hosting their applications in the cloud, and where users from partner organisations need to be securely granted access to enterprise resources, architects are turning to an ever increasingly complex array of security solutions to solve their identity woes. How do we as mere mortals make sense of PKI, Kerberos, SAML, and a plethora of WS-* standards aimed at addressing these concerns? This session will provide a clear and practical description of how to apply today’s security technologies in order to effectively manage and share identity across applications, service and organisational boundaries.
TOPIC: Federated Identity Management in a Service Oriented World with Bill Poole
DATE: Thursday, Sept 4th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Level 2, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome.
Jon skeet has produced a handy Core .NET refcard for some of those things you might commonly look up in MSDN. It’s 6 pages long and quickly covers:
You have to register which is a bit of a pain (although if you have registered before, you don’t need to register again). There are a few other handy reference cards there too.
The release of SQL Server 2008 means that the Express version is also available. SQL Server 2008 Express edition comes in 3 flavours: Express, Express with Tools and Express with Advanced Services. You can get more details on the individual versions and download them here.
Granville Barnett and Luca Del Tongo are writing a free ebook with the aim of providing all developers with a core understanding of algorithms and data structures.
You can download the first draft from here.
Microsoft recently re-released an improved version of a security filter for IIS that is designed to help thwart SQL injection attacks by restricting the types of HTTP requests that IIS will process. UrlScan 3.0 is an IIS add-on that provides real-time validation of HTTP server requests, potentially blocking SQL injection exploits.
UrlScan has actually been available for several years, but Microsoft added some new features in this 3.0 release, including support for query string scanning.
I meant to blog and bookmark this great list of SQL Server resources a while ago: Free SQL Server tools that might make your life a little easier by Mladen Prajdić.
Did you know there is a free SQL profiler available for SQL Express? It’s just one of the very useful tools listed there (direct link here).
This is probably old hat to those people familiar with CAB: there is a debugging aid hosted on CodePlex that can show the WorkItem hierarchy, Workspaces, SmartParts, Commands, Events, State and Items: http://www.codeplex.com/WorkItemVisualizer/. Only drawback is that it seems to slow things down a fair bit.
Brad McGehee has posted a very useful article on the Management Studio Improvements in SQL Server 2008 over at the Simple-Talk blog.