A customer needed Reporting Services 2005 but was running SQL Server 2000 and didn’t want to invest in a 2005 license as 2000 fits their needs just fine. Naturally I was exited to learn that Reporting Services would be available for SQL Express. That however was several months ago.

Now it seems the support has finally been released allowing us to use SQL Server 2000 as data backend and SQL Express as reporting frontend.

SQL Server Express with Advanced Services

“There have been a couple of questions about how to use and integrate MSCS Authentication with ASP.NET Authentication.  For those of you that don't know, MSCS Authentication is Microsoft Commerce Server's authentication cookie/ticket that is used to identify Commerce Server Profile users.  With Commerce Server 2007, we recommend you use the ASP.NET's membership provider but then the question arises, how does our web analytics use and decode this cookie? “

Read more on Commerce Server 2007 Authentication with ASP.NET Authentication.

Everybody should have a version control strategy so Roy Osherove’s post entitled A Simple Version Control Strategy Using Team System is basically a must read even if you don’t use Team System.

Darrel Norton has a very informative post called Seeing Double: An Unbiased View on the Benefits of Multiple Monitors which details an experiment they did where they put developers in front of dual monitors and watched the number of bugs and code churn.

Most importantly they saw the following numbers:

• Productivity in lines of code per day increased 10%.
• Defect levels decreased by 26%.

Very interesting.

I’ve been swearing to the Samsung Spinpoint P120 drives for very quiet PCs in the past but have been frustrated with the low max capacity of the drive (250GB). Now it seems I’ve found a great alternative in the Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB.

SilentPCReview basically says that this drive is the quietest of all desktop drives available today, it even comes close to the good old Seagate Baracuda IV which has been reigning king forever. I know it’s bad form but I couldn’t resist taking this snip,

“For once, a hard drive has lived up to its marketing claims. The 500 GB Caviar SE16 is the quietest 3.5" desktop drive that we know of on the market today. Not only is it quieter than all of the other high capacity drives that we've looked at, it also beats the Samsung Spinpoint P80 and gives the venerable Barracuda IV a run for the money. These are old drives with fewer platters that have less than one sixth the capacity of the new Western Digital.”

Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB: Big Low-Noise Champ?

Well maybe not exactly but Windows Vista does come with an implementation of Launchy which to me is great news seeing as Launchy is the best thing which has happend since sliced bread

Basically you pop up the startmenu using the WIN key and you’re ready to type just like you are with the Lacunhy shortcut. In previous builds of Windows Vista I didn’t even consider using the feature it was so slow, not so with beta 2. Everything is snappy and happends instantaneously.

I do believe that the startmenu search feature will be my favorite feature of Vista.

Oh yeah, did I mention that Vista is fast on a desktop machine? Stay tuned for more posts about Vista, the next one will probably be about how I lost all my data due to running beta versions of both my OS and Office

Up until this point I've only ever tried out Windows Vista on my laptop and have found the performance to be lacking. I'm pleased to inform you that Windows Vista runs sooo much more smoothly on a desktop machine. I mean we're talking leaps and bounds here. Granted my laptop is getting a bit long in the tooth but we're still talking 1.5GHz Penitum-M with a 7200 RPM hard drive, and a gig of memory. Not too shabby even for a two year old laptop.

My desktop machine is equipped with a Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading, and my guess is that the hyperthreading is making all the difference in the world, seeing as the only difference between my laptop and my dekstop machine is the CPU. My desktop is even older than the laptop in any case :) Vista seems to be much more comfortable in a hyperthreaded or even better a dual core environment.

If you were to ask me about one thing to make sure to get for your Vista machine it would definitely be a dual core CPU of some kind.

I forgot to point out one important piece of information from Ryan Donovan's CS 2007 release post. What I failed to mention because my job generally doesn't entail having to deal with licenses and such is that pricing and the editions of CS will remain the same for 2007 as they were for 2002. So that's good news :) Now we can back to the regular scheduled programming involving all the fun technical stuff :)

“I am pleased to report that Commerce Server 2007 has shipped (or RTM-ed in MicroSpeak). Tonight the team has signed off on the Enterprise, Standard, and Evaluation editions in English, French, German, and Japanese. This is another remarkable day in Commerce Server history – as it represents the culmination of 2.5++ years worth of efforts to bring what we think is a very cool solution to market, featuring major enhancements“

Commerce Server 2007 has shipped!

"Use the Interview Worksheets during the interview process to assess a candidate’s level of proficiency for this competency. Competency questions are included along with space to note the candidate’s response and your thoughts about it. After the interview, use your notes to rate the candidate’s overall proficiency level within this competency."

Education Competencies: Interview Worksheets

With Commerce Server almost done it’s good to hear that the StarterSite is receiving extra attention and that it will be available as a web download meaning that we’ll see more frequent releases than we did with the retail sites.

I’m very much looking forward to seeing what the final StarterSite has to offer as the beta version didn’t have a whole lot to look at. Lets hope that folks have gotten the message and don’t base their entire frontend on the StarterSite which has been the case often times in the past.

Check out the Starter Site Update post by Ryan Donovan for more information.

Looks like we can stop thinking about WinFX and concentrate on .NET Framework 3.0 instead. Somasegar announced that WinFX will be renamed to .NET Framework 3.0. Note that the CLR will still be 2.0 so no innovations on that front. Also worth of note is that this will not affect shipping dates in any way, seems pretty straightforward that it shouldn’t but there I said it

.NET Framework 3.0