Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals trial edition requires Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite be installed before you install Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals trial edition.

It makes it pretty tough to use a trial version if you have to buy it first. If I had Team Suite, I "probably" wouldn't be installing the trial…

VisualSVN has been released, and I like what I see. With this version comes visual indicators that show you the status of each file. This, along with support for file/folder deletion, top of an already great feature set including file moving and renaming. This tool integrates seamlessly with the well-known TortoiseSVN, bringing the TSVN experience right into Visual Studio – and then some. This latest release finally brings VisualSVN to a place where I can now whole-heartedly recommend this to any Visual Studio/Subversion user. There is a free trial available, and the license cost is only $19. See the formal announcement on the VisualSVN blog.

Current feature list

• Support for Visual Studio 2003/2005
• Visual status indicators (high-contrast indicators also available)
• File/folder deletion
• File/folder renaming
• Show log
• Repository browser
• Integration with Windows Explorer
• File locking
• Conflict resolution
• Blame
• Update
• Commit
• Diff ("Show Changes")
• Revert
• Patches
• Branch
• Switch
• Merge
• Update to Revision
• Checkout
• Cleanup

How to Blog with Word 2007 and dasBlog

Start by creating a new document using the "New Blog Post" template (New > Installed Templates > New Blog Post)

Initial Configuration

1. Select "Manage Accounts" from the "Blog Post" tab
   

    

2. Create a new account
   
   1. Settings for dasBlog:
      1. API: MetaWebLog
      2. Blog Post URL: http://<blog_root_url>/blogger.aspx
      3. User/Password: Your blog login and password

          

   2. Picture Options
      
      1. Note that I included my FTP username/password in the "Upload URL" path
      2. The "Source URL" will be http://<blog_root_url>/content/binary/

          

Start Blogging

1. Give your post a title
   
2. Write your content

   

    

3. Add style to your content (note that these styles correspond directly to HTML elements)
   

    

4. Stylize your screen shots
   

    

5. Assign categories
   
   

    

6. Publish your content
   

    

7. View the results
   

UPDATE: When blogging about dasblog, make sure that either your image names don't contain "dasBlog" or that you change the content filter for "dasBlog" to be "\bdasBlog\b" (or something similar) so that your images don't end up like: <img src="content/binary/<a>dasBlog<a/>_image_123.png" />

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.