Is it just me or should the "send" button be where the "paste" button is? I almost click "paste" every time I'm about to send an email. Anyone else have this problem?

As a side-note… Word 2007 is awesome for blogging. It just works.

SQL Express

Many people don't realize the full potential of SQL Express. Yes, there are several limitations including the following:

• 1 CPU
• 1 GB RAM
• Limited 64-bit support
• 4 GB max DB size
• No support for the following:
  • Web Services (HTTP Endpoints)
  • Integration Services
  • Notification Services
  • Jobs (though service broker can be used for job-like behavior… thanks Jerry)

BUT, I would say the list of supported items is much more impressive for a free, "lightweight" DB engine:

• Stored Procedures, Triggers, and Views
• T-SQL Enhancements (exception handing, recursive queries, and support for new data types, etc.)
• SQL CLR
• User-defined Types
• Native XML
• XQuery
• Service Broker
• Merge Replication (Subscriber only)
• Transactional Replication (Subscriber only)
• Report Server
• Native Support for Web Services (For reporting services)

To see a complete comparison of the various SQL versions, take a look at Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 Features Comparison.

This is my first post from Word 2007… We'll see how it goes.

If you are a web developer, I recommend that you drop everything right now and go install Nikhil Kothari's Web Development Helper.  It is a fabulous tool for writing and debugging ASP.NET applications.  It helps with in the following areas:

• Tracing
• ViewState
• Caching (ASP.NET and HTTP)
• Restarting AppDomains
• Logging HTTP(S) Traffic (Including XMLHttpRequest)
• DOM
• JavaScript

...and I just realized that Scott Guthrie has also blogged about the Web Development Helper.  For more info, see his post.

For more developer resources (web and otherwise), see my Developers Tools List.

I've about had it with this dialog:


WHY does it take so long for this dialog to come up?  Does it have to scan the entire GAC first?  Maybe so, but that's no excuse for the eternity that I get no response from visual studio after selecting "Add Reference".  I can think of two solutions to this problem off the top of my head:

1. Select the projects tab by default - surely it doesn't take multiple seconds to scan the solution for other projects
2. Threading - You gave us the BackgroundWorker class in 2005 - please use it.

You would think that a little more time would have been put into a dialog that is so commonly used in development.  At least it's resizable in 2005.  Maybe in Visual Studio Orcas it will open in less than 10 seconds.

If you're still on an Atlas CTP and you're wanting to move to the latest ASP.NET Ajax Beta, you've got some work to do.  Here is the ASP.NET Ajax upgrade checklist you will need to follow in order to run under the new beta.  If you've done much with the JavaScript extensions (Ajax control extenders, etc.), you've got even more work ahead.  This whitepaper describes in detail the differences between the Atlas CTPs and the ASP.NET Ajax betas/RTM (don't worry - it's only 54 printed pages <g> ).