My old digital camera was starting to lose the technology race so I've bought a new Canon Digital Ixus 500:

 

Sorry for the poor quality image; had to use my phone camera to take a picture of it!

I bought it at Amazon because I didn't have to leave my seat and they delivered it in 2 days. The only problem I have is the "Customers who bought this item also bought:" part of the page - it's too easy... So in addition I now have:

• 1 of: Tamrac TA5688 Sub-Compact Digital Camera Pouch
• 1 of: Canon NB1LH Spare Li-Ion rechargeable battery
• 1 of: ByteStor 1GB USB2.0 Flash Pen drive
• 1 of: ByteStor Compact Flash Card USB Reader
• 1 of: ByteStor 1GB High speed Compact flash

Ryan Stevens (aka Solidstore) has started blogging. He is a developer right to the core and has a particular talent with networking and security (and FarCry). He even runs a hosting service from his house!

With Ryan that makes four Exony bloggers including our CEO and as we only have 30 or so employees, I make that a better ratio than Microsoft...

I've been getting a lot of referral spam recently particularly since Robert Scoble put his new blog-roll (which includes this site) up on blog-lines. In response I've coded up some changes to the way things work here. There is now a blacklist of url keywords and if your referrer url matches any of the items in it you won't be displayed on any web page. Check this post at the end of the referral list for an example. Finally, if you think I've added your site to the blacklist by mistake then please contact me.

Good news for those like me who lamented the demise of the database diagramming tool in Visual Studio. It's going to make a return in the near future. We just need to get it added back into the SQL Server Management/BI Studio.

Due to popular demand, starting in the October CTP you will be able to create database diagrams using Whidbey with Yukon databases. There are a few changes that have been made to the Whidbey database diagramming capability:

• Diagrams are now assigned a database user as an owner. Individual database users can only see their own diagrams unless they’re a member of the db_owner role. Members of the db_owner role can see any diagram in the database.
• Only SQL Server Yukon is supported for Whidbey diagramming.
• Many minor UI enhancements, additional shortcut keys, and better IAccessibility support.

(via The Return of Database Diagramming!)

My father's house in Connaught Square was on the evening news tonight. It seems Tony Blair has bought a house in the square where he intends to settle after he steps down as Prime Minister. I wonder what that will do to house prices?

I've just been asked by a customer if we could display the text in column headings vertically (i.e. rotated by 90 degrees). After some digging I found a CSS style that works in Internet Explorer 5.5 and above - layout-flow: vertical-ideographic. This way we can get more columns on screen as the headings are usually the widest part. It's not standard CSS but all our clients use IE. The output looks something like:

Just a quick one before I go to bed... From SQL Pass in Orlando, Microsoft have announced three report packs for SQL Server Reporting Services. I downloaded and tried them out today and to tell the truth I'm a little disappointed. Each pack does contain a database you can attach to SQL Server which makes them immediately accessible but that's all I found useful. What I really need from the various add-ons that Microsoft make available is both inspiration and examples of things I don't know how to do. I got neither from these packs.

Understandably, I'm not the target audience for the downloads. They are for people who need a pre-built solution they can tweak. I expect the packs fulfil this need well. If you're looking for novel Reporting Services solutions then you can overlook these downloads.

The thing I'm really exited about is the additional news that Active Views will be included in Yukon Beta 3. I can't wait to get my hands on it. In fact I was on the preview list but, due to work commitments, couldn't make it to Redmond for the design review earlier this month. Now I have to wait like everyone else.

Every month we have to deliver lots of reports to customers and it's a time consuming task. Reporting Services Report Builder, as it's now known, could be of use to me right now (bugs and all) because currently report writing is a skilled activity. The author must know SQL and MDX but with this new tool I can get anyone in the office to create the basic reports and have them completed by the old authors.

I'm sitting on the train ready to return to England, my Wi-Fi detector says there is a wireless network but alas my computer can't find it. The meeting itself was a success but hard work when English is the second language of everyone else at the table. You have to be careful that you really understand what is being said. Plenty of white board pictures help. The funny thing is acronyms - it was a technical meeting so they were abundant but again the language differences play a part. For example, IVR (Interactive Voice Response) is SVI (Server Voice Interactive) in French.

The rest of the trip has had some ups and downs. Eurostar is excellent, almost a hop-on hop off service which beats waiting in an airport for a couple of hours. There is still immigration and customs. In fact I almost missed the out-bound journey because I didn't take passport checking into account.

I don't know Paris at all well so on arrival I tried to get a cab to take me to the hotel. The cab driver wouldn't take me though - too close. So he gave me directions: "turn right at the second set of lights, walk until you get to a bridge, turn left and its down that road". I set off in the direction he pointed and tried to follow his instructions. Well it turns out you need a bit of confidence to walk for a mile or so in a strange city without even knowing if you are going in the right direction. I made it to the bridge and checked the street sign - it wasn't the same street as the hotel address. At this point I bottled and hailed a cab, gave the driver the address and he said "ah, its just on this street" whilst giving me a strange look. He took me and I'm glad he did because it was about a mile "just down the street".

The hotel was a typical Paris affair - a converted building with creaky lifts and tiny rooms. Only just enough room for the bed in fact. Cosy I think they call it. The major problem was the lift shaft was right next door. See how much sleep you get with one of those going all night. The following morning I did actually walk all the way back to the station. I was planning the hail a cab but I couldn't find one until I reached the station.

With the meeting over, the train left the station half an hour ago; I'm now watching the French countryside hurtle past at 160 miles/hour wondering how long the battery life in my tablet is going to last. I just wish I had some network connectivity because it's been two days and I'm getting withdrawal symptoms. I just need to check my mail, read some blogs and see if I've had any referrals, then I'll be happy again.

As a separate note, I have a Tablet PC (bought mainly because of Robert Scoble's evangelism) and I find it funny that wherever I go I have to give a demonstration (closely followed by "Ooh, I love it. How much?". This trip was no different and I'm pleased to say that the handwriting recognition works even when I write in French. Also, One-Note is rapidly turning into a killer app for me - you can doodle in meetings using all the colours and pens provided to create some really great art.

I have a business trip to Paris tomorrow and Wednesday. This is a new customer who has some pretty cool ideas on how they want to use our products. They are very knowledgeable about the issues and technology involved so it should be a fun meeting. The challenge will be to satisfy their requirements within the constraints of our system.

Travel time is approximately two hours, much quicker than flying. I don't suppose EuroStar has fitted their trains with wireless hot-spots?

You may remember a few weeks back when I signed up for a Microsoft ISV Buddy. Well last week I got an email to put me in touch with mine. His name is Gaylon Blank and he's a dev lead in Microsoft human resources IT. It's funny, of all the software that Microsoft write it never really occurred to me that they would be writing their internal software systems. Obvious when you think about it though.

I think Gaylon is a pretty good match for us as we both have similar goals - trying to integrate new Microsoft products into our own offerings. Both of us are using Office Web Components and both are trying to work our how SQL Reporting Services can help.

With all good partnerships I hope this to be a two way street. We just need to work out what part of town it's going to be in.

For some reason I've found other things to blog about recently and have been ignoring Yukon. I was going to get around to writing about partitioned tables but there is no need now. Kimberly Tripp has released a fantastic paper on the subject:

While getting ready for the PASS Community Summit in Orlando this week (where I plan to talk about SQL Server 2005 Partitioned Tables/Indexes), I realized we were close but not quite ready to release the post-beta II whitepaper on MSDN.

So, in preparation for PASS we decided to post a pre-release of the partitioning paper here.

(via Kimberly L. Tripp: Improving your SQL skills)

Chris Rathjen has a post requesting information on how we deal with branching in change management so I thought it would make a good post subject.

At Exony we use Perforce as our source control system for two reasons: it's wickedly fast plus the branch and integration features are excellent. It is similar to SourceSafe in that the repository is structured much like a file system. We have a number of products that use internally developed shared libraries and third party SDKs. The tree on the left of the diagram below shows how things are structured. The right hand side shows the version lines with branch and integrations.

Each product or library has a folder which contains sub-folders representing available versions. All new development happens on the main branch. The nightly build scripts will attempt to integrate changes into the build branch (orange arrows) and then rebuild. If, for any reason, the build fails then the integration is rolled back. This ensures the build branch is always in a build-able state. Perforce change sets come in handy here because you can either commit or revert them based on the build outcome.

When it's nearly time to ship we branch the latest build branch into a "QA" folder (green arrows). This is the v1.0, v2.0, etc folder. This is the build that gets QA'd before it goes out of the door. Any fixes are still made in the main branch and once the nightlies copy the code into the build branch, we do manual integrations into the QA branch. This way we can verify that nothing major is going to de-stable the QA line.

After a release any fixes are made in the correct versioned branch before being reverse integrated back to the mainline if they are still relevant there (not shown on diagram).

Also, every time a build script is run the file versions in that branch are labelled with the build number. That way we can go back to any build on any branch if needed.

The third party SDKs, e.g. Microsoft SOAP or MSXML4, are also stored. These third party folders only contain headers, libs and DLLs used in the build process as there is no reason to store additional binaries such as CHM files.

Sharing code is also based on branching and integration (red dotted lines). Once a shared library is released then its actually integrated into the relevant product mainline. That way we isolate the product from any changes that may be happening to the shared libraries or any other product.

Overall the process works well and we haven't had any build related late nights since implementation (although there have been a couple of product related ones). It's nice to be able to hit a button, grab a coffee and wait for your product ISO to drop out at the end ready for burning onto CDs.