Cool Tool

I was looking for a tool to mount an ISO image to a drive letter that works in Windows. I found a free one that works great in Windows (even x64).

http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html

Certification Second Shot Changes

Microsoft is trying to entice more people with their Second Shot program. If you sign up for this program Microsoft will give you a free second change to take a certification exam if you fail it. I have signed up for this in the past, but never actually used it (hehe). Well this program is now even better.

You still get to retake an exam if you fail it. But now there is an incentive for people that pass the exams. If you pass you get 25% off the price of the next exam that you take. If you take alot of exams like I do, this is a nice little benefit.

http://blogs.technet.com/mslcommunity/archive/2008/10/16/and-the-goodies-just-keep-rolling-in-second-shot-s-double-incentive.aspx

Have fun with your testing.

Linq-to-SQL and Derived Classes

LINQ is a nice new data technology that really provides alot of functionality. LINQ-to-SQL is a version of it that talks to a SQL Server database and will generate classes for you to use. I had a small problem that took a while to figure out that I wanted to share.

I had a class generated from the database called User. From there I had a derived class named ProtectedUser that has some things set in it automatically. When I created a ProtectedUser object when I went to save off the object to the database a null exception was thrown. This was confusing since there was nothing wrong with the object and nothing was null.

Looking around online I found this article that describes the problem:

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=310798

After changing my code to create a new User object and save that off instead things worked perfectly fine. This was hard to find and took weeks of working on it on and off to find it. I wanted to make sure to share this with others to save them the time.

Free beta SQL exam

The folks over at the certification group at Microsoft are offering a free beta exam for the new 70-433. Remember that beta exams are numbered with a 71 and not a 70. This is a nice exam to get you started with the new SQL Server 2008.

http://blogs.technet.com/betaexams/archive/2008/09/17/register-for-beta-exam-71-433-microsoft-sql-server-2008-database-development-beginning-september-19-2008.aspx

Good luck on the exam. Remember that beta exams do count toward certifications but you have to wait until they decide what questions to use and what ones to throw away. The last two beta exams that I have taken earlier this year took over 12 weeks to get results back, but I did pass both of them.

Run .NET 3.5 SP1 from Network Drives

It looks like Microsoft has finally got it where managed code to be able to run from a network drive. Here is some more info on it from a Microsoft blog.

http://blogs.msdn.com/vancem/archive/2008/08/13/net-framework-3-5-sp1-allows-managed-code-to-be-launched-from-a-network-share.aspx

VS2008 SP1 Released

Well the time has come and the long awaited VS2008 SP1 has been released to the MSDN subscriptions. I downloaded this and installed I on my main system and want to share my experiences.

1. The downloads are iso file, so they will have to be burned to a dvd or you will have to use a program to mount the iso files as drives.
2. After getting things to a dvd, I tried to install the servicepack and it quickly crashed. It died in the VC++ x86 installer. This is strange since I am running Vista Ultimate x64 on my system. So I tried many different things went with my favorite search engine to help. I was not able to find anything useful since the service pack had only been released hours ago.
3. I finally read the actual log for the install that was failing and figured out that it was saying that it needed to be rebooted. I have been working on a Windows Service that used .NET 3.5 and that could have caused issues as well. So I uninstalled the app and service that I am working on (more on this in a later post) and restarted my laptop.
4. I then restarted the installer and waited to see what happened. It got past the error I was seeing before. Yea!!!!
5. Then I waited…. And waited…. I made sure my laptop was set to high performance and it still took about 2 hours to install. The laptop is an AMD TL-64 with 4G of ram so it should not be too slow.
6. Everything installed fine and I was off to install the MSDN for sp1. Well it was 3am already so I went to bed and let it install overnight, so I do not know how long it takes to install this part.

Everything seems fine so far. I am looking at some .NET code protectors and will see if the ones I am thinking about work with sp1 or not.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ScottHanselman/~3/364322053/HiddenGemsNotTheSameOld35SP1Post.aspx

SQL Server 2008 RTM!!!

SQL Server 2008 has now been released on TechNet. One thing that you will notice is that there are many different versions available. Something that will be seen soon is that this does not include a new Express version yet. I would guess that this would be released soon as well.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/bb851664.aspx

This is exciting since there are alot of new features in SQL 2008. I will be going over this new version more and more as time goes on...