I've been working a little with SQL Server Compact Edition (which is a *very* cool product, by the way) lately. For those of you that haven't heard about SQL Compact: It's a small version of SQL Server that you host in-process in your .NET applications (it's just a couple of MBs) with full support for tables, indexes, transactions and so on (but no views, stored procedures or triggers). Much like SQLLite and Apache Derby, just better integrated with .NET.

So far I've been using Visual Studio to create and manage databases. This works great, but I didn't like to start up VS and everything just to peek into a database, and I've always felt more at home in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) when working with databases. Well, it turns out that SSMS can be used to manage SQL Compact databases as well! Cool, I didn't know that.

This is basically what you do:

Robert has some more on this on his blog.

Vista SP1 RC and Windows Server 2008 RC1 is now available to MSDN subscribers! Vista SP1 will also be available as a public download from Microsoft sometime next week.

I downloaded and installed Vista SP1 yesterday, and everything went smooth. I haven't noticed much difference yet, but I haven't looked much either.

I also downloaded Windows Server 2008 RC1 and upgraded the server hosting this site (from RC0). I had some trouble initially, because the RC1 upgrade is blocked if you have SharePoint installed (probably due to the fact that they have removed the SP role from Windows and are providing it as a separate download). I had SharePoint installed, but the server Role had disappeared, so I couldn't uninstall it! After some thinking I solved it by getting the separate SharePoint download, which offered me an uninstall option when I ran it.

Below is a screenshot of my potentially risky remote upgrade of the server hosting this site. It's the second time I've upgraded it successfully over Remote Desktop, so it seems to work

Yep, the November CTP was released just hours, maybe minutes ago! As of now, they still haven't posted the link on the SQL Server home page. The downloads have been posted on the Microsoft Download Center for easier availability, follow this direct link to get to the bits:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3BF4C5CA-B905-4EBC-8901-1D4C1D1DA884&displaylang=en

There you can find DVD images and self extracting executables for x86, x64 and IA64. This CTP includes SQL Server Express Edition as well.

Happy downloading!

I month ago my team (Åsmund Eldhuset, Frank Robert Kvam and me) came second in the Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest at NTNU (13th in total) and thereby qualified us for the Northwestern European Programming Contest (NWERC) in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

NWERC is happening this weekend, and the contest itself is today. You should be able to follow the standings live at http://2007.nwerc.eu/live/scoreboard, and if the web cam works (it doesn't right now, it looks like), you should be able to see us as well here: http://2007.nwerc.eu/live/cam3.

While we're waiting for the next SQL Server CTP, it thought I could mention a couple of small things already in the current CTP: Multiple row Insert and Declare-Set combined.

To insert multiple rows  in SQL Server 2005 and before, you had to execute multiple INSERT statements, or use UNION. The first would look like this:

INSERT INTO MyTable (Col1, Col2)
VALUES (1, 'One')
INSERT INTO MyTable (Col1, Col2)
VALUES (2, 'Two')
INSERT INTO MyTable (Col1, Col2)
VALUES (3, 'Three')

And using UNION it would be

INSERT INTO MyTable (Col1, Col2)
          SELECT 1, 'One'
UNION ALL SELECT 2, 'Two'
UNION ALL SELECT 3, 'Three'

In SQL Server 2008, this can be done like this:

INSERT INTO MyTable (Col1, Col2)
VALUES (1, 'One'), (2, 'Two'), (3, 'Three')

I did some quick performance testing and found that UNION and multiple inserts runs on about the same time, while the single inserts are slower. But this is only true as long as the numbers of rows being inserted isn't to high. If inserting 10 000 rows in one go, for instance, the individual inserts are actually faster, probably because of the amount of in-memory data the unions and the multiple row inserts produce, as well as that the last two commands run the whole batch within on large transaction.

Then, Declare-Set combined: It has long irritated me that I had to use two lines to declare a variable and assign a value to it. This is what it looks like i SQL Server 2005 and earlier:

DECLARE @var int
SET @var = 50

DECLARE @var int = 50

DECLARE @var1 int         = 50,
        @var2 varchar(10) = 'Hello!'

Microsoft Norway is running a gadget competition at http://www.gadgetcompetition.no/ these days where users can submit Vista Sidebar Gadgets and Windows Live Gadgets.

My contribution is a Vista Sidebar gadget where you can track packages and letters sent via the Norwegian Postal service, Posten. By entering you package tracking number, the gadget will get the latest updates for you package every 30 minutes and display its status in the sidebar. You can also click the envelope to open up the full package history in a fly out window.

So, if you like the idea, go to the competition site, and download my gadget from the "Gadget Gallery", or use this direct link to live.com. If you like it, please log in with your Windows Live account on www.gadgetcompetition.no and vote for me You can win Vista Ultimate, a mouse or Expression Web just by voting

I've spent some time thinking about what factors determine exam results. It clearly depends upon the amount of effort you put into it (and the preparations) and your skill level, but also how lucky you are with the tasks you get on the exam. I think I've come up with a mathematical relationship for it

Result = Effort x Skills x Fluke

That is, the exam result is the product of effort, skills and how lucky you are. Here, all factors are non-negative, which gives us a non-negative result as well. A result of zero is a fail, anything above that is a pass.

As we can see, if any of the three factors are zero, you will fail. This is easy to explain. First, if the effort is zero, you didn't even bother showing up on the exam, so you will clearly fail. Further on, if you have zero skills, you don't even know how to read, yet alone remember anything, so no matter how much effort you put into it, you will still fail. Finally, a zero luck means maximum bad luck. An example of this could be to get the following exam:

Task 1 of 1: (100 %)
Is P = NP? Prove your answer.

We can also get some more interesting relationships out of the formula. By dividing by Effort on both sides, we get
Result / Effort = Skills x Fluke.

This tells us that, if you got a non-failing grade on the exam, while the effort approaches zero, you either have extreme skills, or you had a huge amount of luck.

We can also get Result / Skills = Effort x Fluke. So if you got a passing grade, and have zero skills, you put in impossible amounts of effort, or had impossible amounts of luck, which is just not possible, so you could not possibly pass the exam.

So, by using this formula, you should be able to develop a strategy for receiving good exam results  Good luck!

...does not work, it looks like.

I upgraded my installation (hosting this site) of Windows Server 2008 from Beta 3 (June CTP) to RC0 today - over remote desktop! My server is located in a locked server room, so I wanted to try a remote upgrade before asking for the key, and it went well. I extracted the ISO onto the hard drive, started the installation from remote desktop and selected the upgrade option. It turns out that the Windows setup doesn't (luckily) show any dialogs where you have to click next during the upgrade. I had a continuous ping trace running and observed the server going up and down a few times, before it completed the installation and enabled incoming remote desktop connections again. Pretty cool!

But, back to the title. Everything worked well after the upgrade, except SQL Server 2008 July CTP. I kept getting error messages from Management Studio when connecting saying "No process is on the other end of pipe", and this led me into thinking that I had a certificate problem. See this blog post.

But, it turns out that this wasn't the issue. The issue is that Windows Server 2008 RC0 ships with a version of SQL Native Client that is newer than what the SQL Server 2008 July CTP supports, so it just doesn't work. This thread says it will be addressed in the next SQL Server CTP. Until then you have two options:

• Use Management Studio 2008 from another machine to administer SQL Server. This will probably still give you problems if you run SharePoint on the same server, at least my SharePoint installation gets the "No process in end of pipe"-error
• Install SQL Server 2005

For now, I'm going with SQL Server 2005 while I'm waiting for the next CTP of SQL Server 2008. I read somewhere that it is expected in the next one to two weeks. It will probably contain lots of new stuff, like spatial data support, Intellisense in Management Studio and so on. Looking forward to it!