Dinesh Kulkarni wrote an important post about changes in LINQ introduced by .NET 3.5 SP1 that has been released yesterday. One of the interesting changes is in the Cast<T> operator and its behavior is better described in this post by Ed Maurer.  Read more

A few months ago I talked about SQL Server Virtualization . For me, taking a look at virtualization improvements is very important, because I still think that not every database can be virtualized, but many of them probably yes! And the trend is that  Read more

<rant mode="funny"> Most of the time I submitted an issue to Microsoft Connect, I got a "it's by design" answer. I've been always irritated by this sentence because they don't admit in this way that they have a bug. Today, I understood I'm wrong.  Read more

The last news is the acquisition of DATAllegro by Microsoft . From a server point of view, Microsoft is doing well (even if not fast as I'd like). But is on the client side that I (and many other customers) are disappointed. I totally agree with the post  Read more

Eric White has written an interesting post titled "Are developers using LINQ?" - there are interesting considerations about the adoption of functional programming too, but the most interesting part for me is the list of comment of the post. A lot of people  Read more

I would like to attend to SQLBits this year, but my agenda is already overbooked. I hope you have the time to attend because there are a lot of interesting sessions , it's a good excuse to visit London (the conference is scheduled on September 13, 2008  Read more

Mosha released a new version of MDX Studio (0.4) , which offers an "MDX Analysis" function that suggest best practices for a given MDX query. I tried the tool with some MDX query and it offers very good suggestion (when possible with link to further information  Read more

Playing with SSIS I normally have to read flat files that come in zip format. The standard procedure here is to launch winzip, decompress the file, read it with a flat file adapter and then delete the uncompressed file. This behaviour generates a lot  Read more

Thanks to a comment sent by a reader of my M2M paper , I just found a possible bug (or " not supported by design feature") of the CREATE LOCAL CUBE mdx statement. In short, it seems that a simple many-to-many dimension relationship is supported, but if  Read more

Two sample chapters of my Programming Microsoft LINQ book are finally available. Links to download pages in the chapters title. Chapter 6 - Tools for LINQ to SQL In this chapter, we took a look at the tools that are available to generate LINQ to SQL entities  Read more