I have received a ton of private mail on this, hence rather than just pasting the same answer in I’m going to take it on here. Interestingly enough I explained this problem, with a slightly different context, back when 2005 SP1 came out here, but lets go through it again with 2008 context. Bob Ward has an excellent post on this here, so if you ...

Spent this morning at the convention centre getting some help from the onsite Tech Support guys with a demo hardware disaster that had an unfortunate impact on my codecamp session. Apologies to the attendees for the lack of focus on the session as I was fighting the hardware all the way! However folks seemed to like the Pex Demo, CodedUI Test and ...

Its Saturday and I am hanging out in the fabby LA weather, high 80's today. I spent the day at the SoCal CodeCamp, no sessions for me to present today so I got spend the day listening to other folks. There is nothing more educational than watching other people present on the product you work on every day. I went to a couple of interesting test ...

Yep I'm off to LA at the end of the week. Originally I was supposed to do a session on Software Quality and Diagnostics for Services, but we gave that slot to some other folks, then I was not going, then I was added to the booth/lounge team and now I also have lunch panel on the future of unit testing(more of that in another post). I've been ...

Get it here

While SSIS has always been able to load SQL Server at high speed it doesn't use any of the high speed Oracle APIs that are available. Well there is now a new high performance loader for Oracle and another one for Teradata. Downloads are here.

One of the most common asks for SQL Server related to servicing/patching (after uninstall of updates/SPs) is the production of slimstreamed media, ie where the Update/SP and the RTM are included together in a single plackage. Now there are a couple of reasons to do this, the first is to save time and complexity for the person doing the installs, ...

Ok so not everything for SQL Server 2008 is available yet, Report Builder is going to have a lag, you can find RC 1 here. This should work with RTM SQL 2008. Here are some of the changes from the last RC; Easy to use wizards for creating table, matrix and chart data regions. Support for directly opening and editing reports stored on the ...

Get it here. That should not be all the pieces of SQL Server 2008 available.

Get it here. No tools or advanced services yet, but they will be here shortly. Good info on this page but beware its download link points to 2005 still.