Tutorials, forums, tips-and-tricks sites and the like abound on the Web and I use them constantly to improve my developer skills, but they often leave much to be desired.
For example, it can take a long time to find just what I'm looking for. One of my pet peeves are tutorials that seem to offer just what I'm looking for but are undated, or the publication date is hard to find, so I waste time checking them out only to find that the content has been rendered obsolete for various reasons.
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Posted by David Ramel on 01/26/20121 comments
Microsoft last week shipped the Entity Framework 4.3 Beta 1, with some NuGet integration enhancements and bug fixes in preparation for the final go-live release, expected in the next couple of months.
"We are planning for this to be the last pre-release version of migrations and our next release will be the final RTM of EF 4.3," said a post on the ADO.NET team blog. It said the team is "still on-track to get a full supported, go-live, release of EF 4.3 published this quarter (first quarter of 2012)."
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Posted by David Ramel on 01/19/20124 comments
A recent salary survey indicates that database-related jobs provide good job security, and don't rank too badly on the salary side of things, either.
Visual Studio Magazine's 2012 .NET Developer Salary Survey noted that, "In terms of top job functions for security and retention, database administrator/developer ranked highest (46.5 percent), followed by senior engineer/senior software developer (43.5 percent) and software architect (43 percent)."
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Posted by David Ramel on 01/12/20122 comments
It was about two years ago when I first wrote about the exciting development possibilities of "Mining the Cloud," with new data markets such as the "Dallas" project on Windows Azure.
Well, Dallas has matured into the Windows Azure Marketplace, and at least one forward-looking research organization is predicting the fruition of that effort into something really big. One of O'Reilly Radar's "Five big data predictions for 2012" published last week is the "Rise of data marketplaces." It reads:
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Posted by David Ramel on 12/20/20111 comments
There were a few database-related goodies in Microsoft's announcement today about multiple Windows Azure updates, including a new Metro-like UI for the management portal, SQL Azure Federation, increased database size and lower cost-per-gigabyte for the biggest databases.
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Posted by David Ramel on 12/12/20112 comments
It took about three years from the release of the first Windows-specific SQL Server to a kind of opening up of the architecture with the inclusion of an Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) driver with SQL Server 7.0 in 1998. Some 13 years later, Microsoft has released the first preview of an ODBC driver for Linux.
Announced at the PASS conference in October, the Linux driver was released earlier this week. Specifically, it's a 64-bit driver (32-bit is planned) only for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, but it's a start.
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Posted by David Ramel on 12/01/20112 comments
The SQL Server world was abuzz lately with last week's announcement that Microsoft was discontinuing its LINQ to HPC (high performance computing) "big data" project in favor of supporting the open source Apache Hadoop in Windows Server and Windows Azure.
This was an interesting development in the larger context of Microsoft's turn-around embrace of the open source world and many who have questioned its motives and commitment (remember long-ago headlines such as "Microsoft raps open-source approach"?).
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Posted by David Ramel on 11/17/20111 comments
Coinciding with a new SQL Server 2012 licensing model, OpSource Inc. introduced a cloud-based service that offers developers and others purportedly cheaper pay-as-you-go access to major database systems.
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Posted by David Ramel on 11/10/20111 comments
Microsoft and Amazon are collaborating to offer developer testing of the next version of SQL Server in the Amazon cloud, promising an easier and cheaper evaluation than you could get with a local implementation.
The marriage of Microsoft SQL Server "Denali" (now, SQL Server 2012) and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud means developers only have to pay standard Amazon Web Services (AWS) rates to test the beta database software, currently in Community Technology Preview 3. AWS pricing for "standard on-demand instances" ranges from 12 cents to 96 cents per hour.
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Posted by David Ramel on 10/27/20110 comments
It's almost like a feuding spouse who leaves the partner only to find out how much they're missed and decides not to cut ties completely and maybe hang out with each other now and then. Well, almost.
The Entity Framework team disassociated itself from the .NET Framework release schedule after EF 4.0 was released with .NET 4.0. The first manifestation of that new policy came last spring when the EF team released an update, EF 4.1, with developer-requested improvements such as Code First capability and a DbContext API.
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Posted by David Ramel on 10/20/20110 comments