From the Jacksonville SQL Server Users Group;

April JSSUG Meeting Wednesday 16th at 6pm (From jssug.com)

JSSUG will be meeting Wednesday at 6PM at the BOA campus.

Where: "Driftwood" room (2nd floor) in Building 500, Bank of America, 9000 Southside Blvd: Map and Directions

Topic: SQL Server 2008 T-SQL Enhancements

This intermediate session by Plamen Ratchev, will focus on some of the T-SQL enhancements in SQL Server 2008 like the new MERGE functionality. These enhancements can cut your coding significantly and can run much faster than SQL Server 2005. Those that came to Plamen's last session requested to see him again.

The final schedule for the SQL Saturday Schedule has been posted on the SQL Saturday site.

I will be giving two presentations at the conference on the Business Data Catalog and Linq for SQL. These mini conferences are very good and they are free.

Like many other web developers on the Mac, I use Parallels desktop 3.0 on the Mac. I go back and forth between Boot Camp and Parallels depending on what I am testing.

I ran the most recent Windows update on my version of Vista while I was in Boot Camp. Now when I try to start Vista in Boot Camp, I get a Genuine Advantage error, and Vista will not continue to start. I have to restart in Boot Camp, and re-enter the serial number. I am running Vista Enterprise which allows virtualization.

I am taking a class on Microsoft SharePoint architecture this week. I learned today in the class that the next version of SharePoint will be 64 bit only. If you are going to be buying new server hardware, get 64 bit hardware.

Not only does SharePoint run better on 64 bit hardware, so does MS SQL Server and ColdFusion. You can also take advantage of much more RAM. I believe that 32 bit hardware is limited to a maximum of 2-4 GBs. 64 bit hardware can go up to 256 Terabytes in theory.

SQL Saturday is coming to Jacksonville on Saturday May 3rd, 2008. The conference will be held at the UNF campus.

The SQL Saturday conferences encompass one hour sessions on SQL Server and technologies used in conjunction with SQL Server.

I will be giving a couple of presentations this year at this conference. You can go and register now, and the registration is free.

I made a blog post over the weekend that Engadget said that they were putting HD DVD on a Death Watch. Today Engadget says that Toshiba will announce tomorrow that they are officially killing HD DVD.

Most likely Toshiba will start manufacturing Blu-ray players. There has been speculation in the tech press that Microsoft pressured Toshiba to create a competing format with Sony to screw up sales of the Playstation 3. I am skeptical about Microsoft pressuring Toshiba, but there is another post on Engadget today saying that Microsoft will not add Blu-Ray support for the Xbox 360.

In the mean time I am going to see if I can find a playstation 3.

Todd over at cfsilence.com had a a question about one of my recent blog posts on converting WMF files to GIF files. I gave an example of how to do this in .NET, but how do you leverage ColdFusion's .NET integration to do the same thing in ColdFusion.

The first thing you have to do is create a class project in .NET. Add a reference to the System.Drawing library. Here is the class I built for this example;

[More]

I have been developing a lot of windows workflows and web services in .NET recently. I came across a need to convert a WMF file (Windows Meta File) into a gif file. SQL Server Reporting Services can not display WMF files.

.NET 2.0 can convert and resize images natively. Here is how I converted the WMF files. First I added the following using statements;

InfoPath saves images as Base64 strings, and .NET treats this as a byte array. So I had to convert the WMF byte array to a gif byte array.

Yahoo's board of directors rejected Microsoft's offer to buy Yahoo this weekend. I have been thinking about the Microsoft Yahoo takeover proposition. It reminds me of Time Warner AOL merger. There are a lot of reasons why the AOL Time Warner merger failed. The one reason that sticks in mind was the cultural differences between AOL and Time Warner. The cultures of the two companies clashed. Never mind the fact that AOL's business model was based on dialup internet access and a walled garden of content.

Microsoft and Yahoo would have similar culture problems if they merged. Microsoft eats its own dog food when it comes to consuming technology. Microsoft, for the most part, uses Windows Server, SQL Server, .NET and IIS. Yahoo uses a lot of open source technology including Apache, Linux and PHP. They also use a lot of Adobe software as well. The developers who develop for open source technologies, don't like Microsoft, and they do not want to work with Microsoft. If Microsoft were to buy Yahoo, they would not keep any of Yahoo's infrastructure. They would rip it out in favor of Microsoft technology. All of Yahoo's PHP apps would be rewritten in .NET, Linux would be replaced with Windows, and Apache would be replaced with IIS.

Microsoft's attraction to Yahoo has to largely with Ad revenue. Ironically, this is one of the things that attracted Time Warner to AOL.

For full disclosure, my current employer is a Gold Partner with Microsoft. I am also a stockholder in a company that does business with Yahoo. At my current company, we have a pretty good working relationship with Microsoft. I think Microsoft should consider partnering in certain areas with Yahoo, but a full merger is a bad idea.

Mercury New Media in Tampa is hiring;

Mercury New Media is looking for candidates to fill a ColdFusion developer position. Depending on applicant qualifications this could be a mid- or senior-level developer position. Mercury New Media is a comprehensive web consultancy specializing in strategic guidance, design and development of websites and business process automation. We are largely a ColdFusion, .NET and SQL Server shop and are looking for strong contributors to our team.

To learn more about Mercury New Media, please visit www.mercurynewmedia.com. Forward your resume to dbickel@mercurynewmedia.com.

2007 has been an exiting year for me because of many changes in my life. The ColdFusion 8 launch was very exiting and has been successful for Adobe. I wish I had more time to devote to the JaxFusion user group this year to cover all of the new features.

I also started a new job working as a technical consultant. I did that to get more hands on experience using the BI features in SQL Server 2005. I also have had the opportunity to work with Microsoft Sharepoint and .NET this year. It has been great to learn new things related to these other products.

I just wanted to wish everyone a happy and safe new year.