On your mark. Get set. Install.

No not yet. Yes it is true that Microsoft will have its “Global Virtual Launch” event for SQL Server 2012 on March 7th 2012 but you won’t be able to download and install the final bits on that day. This purely a marketing event to get you excited about the upcoming real product.

One thing that will really happen on that day is an online event hosted by Microsoft. This event offers more than 30 sessions that you can watch live online. Visit http://www.sqlserverlaunch.com for all the details and to register.

I just published a new article. This time it is about a feature that was added in Visual Studio 2008 that surprisingly not every developer is aware. The subject is extension methods.

You can read the article from http://www.emoreau.com/Entries/Articles/2012/01/Extension-methods-in-Net.aspx.

This is coming real soon. This Saturday January 28, the Montréal .Net Community will have another one of its famous ".Net Saturday". This event is titled "Tirer le maximum de Visual Studio pour construire des applications de qualité!"

All the info (and the registration) is avalaible from http://www.dotnetmontreal.com/events/25833471/ 

Aaron Bertrand put together (and still maintain) a list of valuables and free resources for SQL Server. It is worth looking at it athttp://sqlblog.com/blogs/aaron_bertrand/archive/2010/10/26/useful-free-resources-for-sql-server.aspx

Yesterday night I was presenting at the “Communauté .Net Montréal” (http://www.dotnetmontreal.com/) the same session I did at DevTeach/SQLTeach last summer.

This session is titled “Running .Net code in SQL Server and the Table Value Parameters for the developers”. The session is about features of SQL Server that are not very well known from the developers. In the first part of the session, I showed how to run .Net code into the database and some tricks to deploy it to production server that ease the DBA job. In the second part of the session, I showed how to use Table Value Parameter (TVP) from a .Net application.

Judging from the number of questions, the crowd liked these topics.

Don’t forget that you can get the details of these 2 topics by reading http://www.emoreau.com/Entries/Articles/2011/05/Creating-SQL-Stored-Procedures-in-Net-SQL-CLR-Integration.aspx and http://www.emoreau.com/Entries/Articles/2010/11/SQL-Table-Value-parameters.aspx.

I have just published a new article, the last one for 2011.

No .Net programming this month, only SQL code, but still, I sincerely hope, useful for you.

This article is about the Grouping Sets feature of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and above.

You can read this article from http://www.emoreau.com/Entries/Articles/2011/12/Microsoft-SQL-Server-Grouping-sets.aspx.

If you are like me, one of the tool you open everyday is SSMS. And chances are that from a single PC, you always connect to the very same database. I have seen numerous questions in newsgroup asking how to bypass this dialog.

My friend Damir has documented an easy trick that does just that by simply adding a few arguments to your shortcut. You can read it from http://blogs.technet.com/b/canitpro/archive/2011/12/12/the-sql-guy-post-6-save-time-connecting-to-sql-server-using-management-studio-ssms.aspx

No Silverlight is not dead. The latest version, which is Silverlight 5, is now available at http://www.silverlight.net/learn/overview/what's-new-in-silverlight-5

I just released a new article about a free library named FileHelpers I had on my “to-test-list” for a very long time. This morning, I decided it was the time. And sincerely, I should have done it time long ago!

This component is mainly used to transform any text file (fixed length or delimited) to a structured type or a datatable. But its power doesn’t stop there!

Take a couple of minutes to read the article from http://emoreau.com/Entries/Articles/2011/11/Using-the-FileHelpers-Library.aspx and try the demo application, you will surely be impressed!

A couple of months ago, one of my clients installed Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express. While I was looking at the log last week, I saw something really strange.

This message was repeated continuously in the logs:

“Starting Up Database ‘xxx’”

If like me, you are using a SQL Server Express database in a multi-user environment, you should really consider switching your AUTO_CLOSE setting to off. You will find this setting in the properties of your database under Options.

You can also use this T-SQL statement:

ALTER DATABASE YourDB SET AUTO_CLOSE OFF