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