The two first weekends in August I were in Cape Town and Johannesburg respectively presenting at SQL Saturday events. I had a great time, and the audience were terrific. My employer Derivco graciously gave me some “swag” to hand out, and that went down a treat. Thanks Derivco!!

After the events some people have emailed me and asked for the presentations, so I thought I’d upload them to SlideShare, so anyone that are interested can get to them. Seeing that I recently switched to a new blog platform, Octopress, and I a couple of days ago came across a SlideShare plugin for Octopress – I decided to test it out by posting the presentations here on my blog.

The two presentations I did were based about the “weird/wonderful (or not so wonderful)” things we have experienced at Derivco in our live production environments:

• SQL Real World Error Handling – Gotcha’s when doing error-handling in SQL Server
• Message Queues in SQL Server – Enhance performance by using queues in SQL Server

In an earlier post, I wrote how I had changed blog-engine from WordPress to OctoPress. At the moment I am running Windows as my main OS (mostly due to work related requirements), and – as OctoPress is very much Ruby and Python based – there are certain things to be aware of when installing this on Windows. Furthermore, my blog is now hosted on Windows Azure – so, with all this in mind, I thought I’d put together a blog post about the set-up of OctoPress on Windows, running on Windows Azure.

Every so often I get an itch, and I want to try out a new blog-platform. The time has now come to leave my self-hosted WordPress and move on to something “geekier” (I am a geek after all).

I have just now finished moving my few posts from WordPress to the new engine: OctoPress. In a future blog post on the new blog I will try to explain why I made the move, and why OctoPress. The new blog will be hosted on Windows Azure – I do get free Azure credits together with my MSDN subscription, so I thought I’d see what all the “fuss” about Windows Azure is.

As of a couple of minutes ago, I pointed a CNAME record for www.nielsberglund.com to my new Windows Azure host. We’ll see after a while if all worked. RSS feeds etc. should be as before – as I use feed-burner.

So, see you all on the other side!

As some of you may know, I – once upon a time – developed a project (VS add-in, templates, etc) for automatic deployment of CLR assemblies to SQL Server: SqlClrProject. That project has been dormant now for a couple of years, but I now and then get requests for where it can be downloaded from (I had it on CodePlex, but had to take it down as I didn’t publish the source code).

A while ago I decided to start to use Git and GitHub as source control (I have been using SVN since forever), and as part of the “getting to grips” with Git, I created a repo for SqlClrProject on GitHub. So the source for the project is now available on GitHub.

If you are interested in the  fork it, play with it. The state of it is that it “should” work on VS 2008 / SQL 2008. It most likely will work on VS 2010 as well. And of course the standalone deployment executable will work regardless of VS version.

I have a while ago just finished watching the live stream of the first keynote (yes there will be one tomorrow as well), at Microsoft BUILD. Having attended / presented, at quite a few of these kind of events – and being somewhat jaded (well OK then, a lot jaded), I must still say that I am impressed.

Transactions in SQL Server seems to be a difficult topic to grasp. This weekend I came across a blog-post where the poster showed a “solution” to the “The ROLLBACK TRANSACTION request has no corresponding BEGIN TRANSACTION” error we sometimes see when various stored procedures call each other. The solution (even though it masked out the error in question) did not get it quite right. So I thought I would make a post about the subject.

So yesterday I wrote about how I have started using F# and Mono on my MacBook.

I wrote about how I downloaded the F# bits, unzipped and put them in a specific directory I had created. Today after having browsed around a bit more I realized I had done it the hard way. To install the required bits for F# for Mac, you only have to download a zip file with an install package for Mac from the F# Cross Platform site on CodePlex. The actual zip-file for the November 2010 CTP is here.

After you have downloaded the file you unzip it and run the .pkg file. This takes care of everything; no re-signing with the .snk file etc. The added benefit of installing from the .pkg file is that a couple of F# compiler dll’s are automatically gac:ed (they are needed if you want to run the F# plugin for MonoDevelop), and aliases are created for the F# compiler and the F# interactive window.

This is a first post about my experiences with running F# and Mono on a Mac.

In a previous post I wrote about how I have started to play with F#. As that post also covered SQLCLR it was obvious I was on Windows. Even though I make my living from development in a Windows environment, my main machine is a MacBook, and I run OSX as my main OS. I have previously also been running Linux (ArchLinux) on this machine as my main OS. Naturally I have heard about Mono (and also installed it a couple of times – and quickly un-installed again, but I have not really done anything with it. I have always run Windows in a VM on my MacBook for development etc. However after the announcement that F# was going Open Source, and Tomas P posted about his F# MonoDevelop plug-in, I decided that I should have a look at what it would be like to do F# “stuff in OSX.

At PDC 2010 Microsoft showed the new Async features of coming C# (and VB.NET) versions, and quite a lot has been written about it already. Part of the Async CTP is TPL Dataflow, and this has gone somewhat un-noticed.

Recently I have become very interested in F# and I am at the moment trying to get to grips with it. It is definitely a different beast than C#, but so far I like it – a lot!

Anyway, I am a SQL nerd, and many moons ago I was very heavily involved in SQLCLR (for you who don’t know what that is; it is the ability to run .NET code inside the SQL Server engine. It was first introduced with SQL Server 2005). So I thought it would be a “giggle” to see if I could get some F# code running inside SQL Server.