1.) XAML Power toys - XAML Power Toys is a Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Multi-AppDomain Add-In that empowers WPF & Silverlight developers while working in the XAML editor.  Its Line of Business form generation tools, Grid tools,  DataGrid and ListView generation really shorten the XAML page layout time. 

• http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/xaml-power-toys/

2.) Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET Framework 3.5 Released! - Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET Framework 3.5 are now publicly available.

• Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
• Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Language Pack
• Microsoft Chart Controls Add-on for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
• ASP.NET Samples
• Documentation

3.) WPF Toolkit – Oct 2008 Release - http://www.codeplex.com/wpf/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=15598

4.) Permanent Link- Keep Your Office 2007 Documents Readily Available the Easy Way

5.) CodeRush Xpress for C# - Developer Express and Microsoft are proud to announce a new version of CodeRush licensed exclusively for C# developers working in Visual Studio. The new product is called CodeRush Xpress, and it includes a fresh selection of hand-picked features taken from CodeRush and Refactor! Pro.

Today I received an update to my Sonos system.  Great things abound.

Included in this release is Sonos access to Last.fm, Pandora and 1000’s of radio stations and ‘shows’ from around the world.

Just messing around I entered West Chester, Ohio and got a list of all the local radio stations.  Of course you can enter any city you wish.  Very cool.

Sonos®, Inc., the leading developer of wireless multi-room music systems for the home, today released Sonos System Software 2.7. Sonos 2.7 delivers a world of music to every room of the house—free of charge—by providing instant, computer-free access to Last.fm and Pandora® personalized radio services, plus more than 15,000 radio stations and shows via Sonos Radio.

The system now provides music from both subscription-based services (Napster®, Rhapsody® and SIRIUS®) and free music services (Last.fm, Pandora and Sonos Radio) right out of the box.

All of these services stream music directly from the Internet to the house so they work even when the computer is turned off – no need to download songs or have a server running.

Sonos’ new Radio guide, powered by RadioTime, lets you tune in to more than 15,000 free Internet radio stations, radio shows and more. You can browse easily for both local and international stations or use Search to find a specific station, show or host. When you find what you want, simply add it to Favorites for your future listening.

Last.fm on Sonos is a free global music service that lets you discover, play and share new songs and artists based on your unique musical tastes — right from any Sonos Controller. After an account is created on Last.fm, Sonos customers can enjoy continuous music streaming all over the house. Simply enter the name of a favorite artist or tag keywords and Last.fm’s unique recommendation system instantly creates a personalized radio station featuring music you’re sure to love. Last.fm on

Sonos also features the capability to scrobble all of the music you play on your Sonos Multi-Room Music System. Every song you listen to on Sonos — whether it’s from your personal music library or a music service like Napster®, Rhapsody®, Pandora®, and of course, Last.fm — is automatically added to your personal music profile. This allows Last.fm to customize your music recommendations and open the doors to even more music discovery, in more rooms of the house.

Pandora, the popular personal radio service is now available for free on Sonos. After creating a free account on Pandora.com, Pandora lets you create and play up to 100 radio stations based on your favorite songs or artists. Using Pandora’s Music Genome Project®, Pandora’s highly-trained musicians analyze songs, one at a time, using close to 400 musical traits including melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics, and more to automatically build a station with songs that share interesting musical similarities. With a Sonos Controller in hand, you can rate the music you hear to further refine the station’s playlist on the fly. Play the same Pandora radio station in each room, perfectly synchronized; or, play different stations in different rooms to fit the mood.

Other new features of Sonos System Software 2.7 include:
• Updated Rhapsody support with improved sound quality. Rhapsody now streams at 192 MP3 (versus 128 kbps WMA previously).
• Support for RTSP streaming protocol which allows for expanded Internet Radio coverage.

My experience with the relatively new Telerik reporting solution has been very positive.  In order to create a report you simply need a 3 dll’s within your solution and a data source. 

The data source can be ANY ADO.NET data source as well as business objects, XML, Web Services etc.  As the data source can be any ADO.NET source the reporting solution works against SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, Access, OLE DB etc.

I have been a big fan of SQL Reporting Services for quite a while (moving to SQL RS many years ago as I ran from Crystal Reports).  Unlike SQL RS it is a very fast install on local development workstation and nothing on the server is required.  The product is licensed by developer making utilization by the enterprise not dependent on the number of users.  This really works out well in the Internet type environment. 

I found the the designer (within Visual Studio) to be very fast and easier to use that SQL RS.  The drag and drop features and the visual clues are clearly superior than other reporting solutions I have used.

Telerik Reporting supports the most commonly used output formats out-of-the-box: PDF, Excel, RTF, CSV, MHTML, BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and metafile (EMF).

The Telerik product certainly makes it easy to find the data source, connect within Visual Studio and drag and drop the fields onto the design surface.

More information can be found online at Telerik Reporting

This is a free (please donate) SQL Server Management Studio add-on that is small, easy to install and is packed with some great features.

• Query Execution History – every sql statement that you run is automatically logged and available at a later time
• Search Database Data – search through all non-binary columns in every table of the database for a search term.
• Uppercase/Lowercase Keywords
• Run one Script on multiple databases
• Copy execution plan bitmaps to clipboard
• Generate Insert statements for a single table, the whole database or current resultsets
• Create, Read, Update and Delete stored procedure generation
• plus more!
  
  

Check it out SSMS Tools Pack

I read this post by Josiah Cole and have to provide this abbreviated list and less sarcastic version of things to do when designing a web site.

1. Do not resize the user’s browser window ever.
2. If your web site does not immediately load on your home page and deliver your message within a couple of second’s your site needs redesign.
3. Never ask your customer which version they want to visit (high/low bandwidth etc.)
4. Never develop a web site entirely in Flash.
5. Do not reinvent the website navigation.  Put the navigation along the top, left or even right. Period.
6. Print designers do not have the same skill set as web site designers.
7. Content is King.  Search engines need real text.
8. Ensure your web site can work in the major browsers FireFox and Internet Explorer.
9. No flashing items on the web site (no blinking, blipping or barking)
10. Never put music on the web site.
11. Use text navigation (not graphics)
12. A site map with logical sub sections is better than using drop downs.
13. If your site needs a search engine to find content it’s time to redesign the web site.
14. The size of the pages is important. Keep it low and small.  50% of American web users do not have broadband.
15. Do not hide your message or obscure what you want users to do.
16. Allow individuals to get to the content fast and easily.  Make the content easily visible and provide mechanisms to allow users to jump to items of interest.
17. If you use video embed your video in Flash within the browser.
18. Never make your users mouse over a graphic to understand what it is or where it will navigate the user to.
19. Use new technology sparingly.  The users of the web site will not be as impressed by new technical things as you may be.

Josiah this is a great list of things to do and not do to establish a great web site.  These are certainly words to live by.

“Cannot resolve collation conflict for equal to operation” – huh?

When joining fields in different collated databases you can see the above error message.  In my particular case I had two databases with different collations and I was doing a join across the databases on the fields.

The resolution was to add the keywords “COLLATE DATABASE_DEFAULT” near the equal ‘=’ signs.

For example:

SELECT p1.BEEF_1 FROM dbo.PHEN p1 INNER JOIN 
Database2.dbo.PHEN p2 ON p1.BEEF_1 COLLATE DATABASE_DEFAULT =p2.BEEF_1 COLLATE DATABASE_DEFAULT AND
p1.BEEF_2 COLLATE DATABASE_DEFAULT=p2.BEEF_2 COLLATE DATABASE_DEFAULT

Collation can affect where clauses, join predicates, functions and databases.

More about Collation

A Collation encodes the rules governing the proper use of characters for either a language, such as Greek or Polish or an alphabet such as Latin1_General (the Latin alphabet used by western European languages).

Each SQL Server collation specifies three properties: sort order for Unicode data types (nchar, nvarchar, ntext), the sort order for non-Unicode character types (char, varchar and text) and finally the code page used to store non-Unicode character data.  A SQL Server collation defines how the database engine stores and operates on character and Unicode data.