This is a new feature in SQL 2008 - a clever way to manage multiple servers

http://www.sqlshare.com/player.aspx?vid=673

This can be very handy when navigating in Excel

• Customize Quick Access Toolbar
• More Commands...
• Choose Commands from: select "Commands not in the Ribbon"
• Add the "back" command.
• Click OK

The "back" command now appears in the Quick Access Toolbar in Excel.

I went to a presentation on the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) at the Microsoft Research Labs in Cambridge on Tuesday.

Here is the blurb:

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a new library in .NET that enables greater reuse of applications and components. Using MEF, .NET applications can make the shift from being statically compiled to dynamically composed. If you are building extensible applications, extensible frameworks and application extensions, then MEF is for you.

You can use the Document Inspector to find and remove hidden data and personal information in Office documents that were created in Office Word 2007, Office Excel 2007, Office PowerPoint 2007, and earlier versions of these Office programs. It is a good idea to use the Document Inspector before you share an electronic copy of your Office document, such as in an e-mail attachment.

Open the Office document that you want to inspect for hidden data or personal information.

I just came across a useful article about Vista remote desktop supporting multiple monitors.

Vista Remote Desktop Wide Screen:

You can access these features using the command line in a few ways:

If you know the dimensions that you want, you can specify the height and width:

mstsc /w:2048 /h:768 /v:(servername)

I attended a Microsoft presentation last night on the new ADO.NET Entity Framework which was released on Monday (11 Aug 08) as part of VS 2008 SP1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

The essential idea is to allow developers to use LINQ to work against a conceptual model of the database instead of the physical model.

The Entity Framework uses two XML mappings

SSDL - Store Schema Definition Language (the physical schema)

I’ve added a page to IC for recording details of release schedules for software used by iMIS – for example the next versions of Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Office.

http://www.imiscommunity.com/microsoft_and_other_vendor_software_release...

If you come across any information on release schedules for products that we use or integrate with can you update it here.

I found this here - it is pretty useful

http://weblogs.asp.net/bradleyb/archive/2005/12/09/432802.aspx

This is how to add a command to the shell to open a folder as a web site in Visual Studio 2005 or 2008.

Visual Studio 2005/2008 does not support this by default but you can enable the scenario by writing a macro.

To do this, create a new macro either in an existing module or in a new module. For this example I’m going to add a module call Website to the MyMacros project.

I recently attended a Microsoft MSDN Roadshow. The slides for the presentations are here:

http://www.msdnroadshow.co.uk/

It covered
* ADO.NEXT – Entity Framework & Data Services
* ASP.NEXT – The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions
* Building Rich Internet UI with Silverlight 2
* Getting the most from the Visual Studio Team Suite Toolbox

Probably the most interesting area was all the tools that are now available in Visual Studio Team System for unit testing, SQL refactoring and schema versioning.

I attended a presentation on SQL Server 2008 in Cambridge last night. I'm sure the list of features are available elsewhere so I will just add some comments on things of interest.

The presenter was Dr Andras Belokosztolszki - one of the SQL gurus at Red Gate. This was part of a series of presentations being given by NxtGenUG - coming up are:

Media Centre
ADO.NET data services
F# (presented by the Don Syme - guy who invented it)