Andy has been busy lately on a project you'll be hearing more about soon (!), but he did manage to get part four of his managing jobs series done. This article discusses ideas for patterns to follow when building jobs, including writing to the console, setting errorlevels, and how to get them installed on the server. DBA's, if you're not developers, look at this article - this is stuff you can take to your development team and get better/more manageable jobs.   Read more...

If you're a VB.NET programmer who wants to learn database programming with ADO.NET, here's a new book that presents all the skills you need in a logical progression from the simple to the complex. Along the way, you'll learn how to use the classes, properties, methods, events, and techniques that have made this subject so hard to master. And when you're done, you'll have a reference that you'll use on the job every day. (Publisher Provided Description, not reviewed)   Read more...

This week Andy looks at where, when, and how jobs should be run and why you need to think about those items before you build the job. Part of this is deciding what runs on production servers and what doesn't.   Read more...

Andy talks briefly about why the company he works for has decided to require all developers to obtain the MCSD, then takes a look at the book they chose for the initial round of study for the first exam.   Read more...

In this article, columnist Christopher Duncan shows you how to create your dream development project.   Read more...

Architectural choices for data access affect performance, scalability, maintainability, and usability. This article focuses on the performance aspects of these choices by comparing relative performance of various data access techniques, including Microsoft® ADO.NET Command, DataReader, DataSet, and XML Reader in common application scenarios with a Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database.  Read more...