I think I'm going through one of my bi-annual mid-life crises again. I really should be sleeping, I have a hospital appointment in the morning (just a diabetic clinic followup thing - 10 minutes and a lecture about my diet...great fun - and eerily similar to an ex-girlfriend). Anyway, whilst awake, I've been having a look at some articles around the web (so technically, keeping me awake has been looking at some articles around the web, but stop complaining - you might find some of them useful!)...

One of the least talked about enhancements to Whidbey is the stuff they're doing with Windows Forms, whilst not dramatic they are pretty important improvements in this article, Michael Weinhardt takes a look at some of the cool new features in Whidbey's new Windows Forms Gridview control. There are some really useful features in there!

Also, during my recent load-testing fiasco, I came across Sql Server Performance.com, as the name suggests, this site is full of a ton of tips, queries, tool reviews etc...all focussed on improving the performance of your DB access - all very nice and all easy to understand. This is one of my bugbears - and a thing which i find many developers just don't have a grip on, it's really important to understand the best way to structure your DB for both read and write operations - Indexes are your friends! So, just go to the site and work through some of the articles - you'll be a better coder because of it.

Keith Brown's Security Sample gallery - just a whole load of interesting .NET (and other) samples, covering some of the more esoteric aspect of windows security - if you have a security problem, if no-one else can help...umm...go to this site.

Visendo SQL-Admin...Really useful tool, lets you do proper admin on MSDE - why I hear you cry would I want to do that? Well, if you're wanting to host a pretty low traffic website (i.e., a pretty average website - you can actually handle a whole lot of users with caching etc...), you can save yourself / your client a bomb by using MSDE and Windows Server 2003 Web Edition - as in $397 versus $999 for Standard Edition - plus the cost of a SQL Server 2000 license, so you could have a fully functional DB driven server for less than $400 (plus cost of hardware)!

I'll just cut and paste the bits from the page:

-> Download

Visendo SQL-Admin is a free replacement for the Enterprise Manager of the MS SQL-Server. If you try to install MS SQL-Server on Windows 2003 Server Web-Edition it doesn't work. Installing databases is denied. But you are allowed to install the MSDE (desktop engine). To administrate this, you need an additional tool because you also can't install the MS SQL-Server administration tools.

The solution is Visendo SQL-Admin. With this freeware tool which is built on the .NET Platform, you can administrate your SQL-Server or MSDE very comfortable.

SQL-Admin Features:

- Create databases- Delete databases- Backup databases- Restore databases- Detach databases- Attach databases- Add SQL users- Remove SQL users- Add windows accounts- Remove windows accounts- Create tables- Delete tables- Open/view tables- Modify table data- Create views- Delete views- Open/view views- Edit view data- Create stored procedures- Delete stored procedures- Edit stored procedures- Sql query tool included