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A few SQL Server script resources:

• SQL Server Best Practices
• Script Repository: SQL Server 2005
• Vyaskn’s SQL Server Site
• Backup, Integrity Check and Index Optimization
• SQLServerCentral Scripts
• Scripts and Tools for Performance Tuning and Troubleshooting SQL Server 2005
• SQL Server Query Processing Team
• Common Solutions for T-SQL Problems
• SQL Server Programming Hacks
• Davide Mauri’s Index Scripts
• Seven Monitoring Scripts
• Five Very Useful Index Selection Queries for SQL Server 2005

Updated: added a few more.

Ola Hallengren has some very useful SQL Server scripts for Backup, Integrity Check and Index Optimization over at his blog.

I came across this link to the Resource Guide to Free Microsoft Software and Online Services over at Nick Hodge’s blog. It’s a useful, one stop collection of free Microsoft resources. As a bonus, it’s being updated!

This morning I received an email welcoming me into the Microsoft MVP award program. I would sincerely like to thank everyone for their support and encouragement. Over the last 5 years I have met and corresponded with several MVPs and have always had the highest respect for their skills, knowledge and commitment. It’s an honour and I hope I can live up to it.

Congratulations to Joe Albahari, who was also awarded MVP status today.

Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, October 2nd to hear Joe Albahari present a session on two parallel programming technologies at the forefront of threading in the .NET world. In this session, Joe will demonstrate both technologies, and look at how well they solve some real-world problems. He will also discuss what it means to think of LINQ queries as functional programming islands, and why this is important in how you code today. Finally, we’ll look at their relative performance, and whether PLINQ is indeed a practical solution for completely transcending the hard problem of thread safety.

TOPIC: PLINQ and TPL: Solutions for Parallel Programming with Joe Albahari
DATE: Thursday, October 2nd, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Level 2, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

More details here.

Thus far the programming gods have been good to me, and I’ve had nothing to do with SharePoint development(!), but a colleague was asking me a few questions and curiosity led me to Andrew Connell‘s blog. He’s a SharePoint MVP and his SharePoint Debugging and Logging Tips and Tricks has some good starting points.

Today I realised that I’m not using JetBrains Resharper enough. Joe White has an excellent series of articles on getting more out of it over at his blog. And not a pear tree in sight…ouch!

It’s old news by now and a little off topic(!), but GIMPS (the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) has announced the discovery of 2 new Mersenne primes:

On August 23rd, a UCLA computer discovered the 45th known Mersenne prime, 2^43,112,609-1, comprising 12,978,189 digits, the first 10 million plus digit prime to be found!

On September 6th, the 46th known Mersenne prime, 2^37,156,667-1, a 11,185,272 digit number was found by Hans-Michael Elvenich! This was the first Mersenne prime to be discovered out of order since Colquitt and Welsh discovered 2^110,503-1 in 1988.

Stack Overflow, the collaboration between Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky opened up to the public today, after a short five-week private beta period.

What is it? It’s a “collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers“.

The DreamSpark program gives students access to Microsoft’s development software for free, and although it was launched in February this year, DreamSpark was not available to students in Australia, despite being available in other countries. The good news is that has now changed, with the program recently opened to Australian students at TechEd in Sydney.

The tools covered by the program are Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 Professional Edition, Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition, Expression Studio, and XNA Game Studio.

Students need to prove their eligibility for the program during signup, and participants must re-verify their student status annually.