HIGHER SOURCE RAISES STAKES IN INTERNET INDUSTRY

Microsoft Corporation has announced plans to acquire the
Website and Internet development corporation Higher Source for an
undisclosed fee.

MSSQL Server Reporting Services: Black Belt Administration: "Governor"

In working with many reporting tools over my career, particularly within enterprise business intelligence suites and high-end production reporting systems, I have become acquainted with various control features in each that allow administrators to govern the actions of end users. Reporting Services is no different in this aspect of need for control, and the application provides numerous avenues for restraining our users from kicking off resource crippling queries that, unchecked, could disrupt even the most robust systems, as well as to prevent other harmful activities. At various junctures within this series, we will examine ways to effect such controls on an intermittent basis.

Teach Old Data New Tricks with the Fully Loaded Advances in ADO.NET 2.

The Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0 delivers an updated ADO.NET that will streamline your data access development efforts. The ADO.NET team has worked with both the System.Xml team and the SQL Server™ team to provide a consistently rich developer experience, crossing technology boundaries from ADO.NET to XML and back. This will all be apparent as you dig into ADO.NET 2.0. There are improvements on so many fronts that you will certainly be pleased.

Rather than attempt to list every new and updated feature of ADO.NET 2.0, I will discuss in detail some of the more interesting improvements and focus on performance and flexibility.

Using Source Control to Develop Smarter

Veteran and novice developers alike need source control management (SCM). Also known as asset management, and source code management, SCM helps you (and your team) manage development projects, and the components and code that make up the project.

There are many benefits to using source control management, most notably the ability to develop code faster, smarter and more accurately. Source control management tools help you control your code; especially in multiple developer projects.

The Trustworthy Computing Security Development Lifecycle

This paper discusses the Trustworthy Computing Security Development Lifecycle (or SDL), a process that Microsoft has adopted for the development of software that needs to withstand malicious attack. The process encompasses the addition of a series of security-focused activities and deliverables to each of the phases of Microsoft's software development process. These activities and deliverables include the development of threat models during software design, the use of static analysis code-scanning tools during implementation, and the conduct of code reviews and security testing during a focused "security push". Before software subject to the SDL can be released, it must undergo a Final Security Review by a team independent from its development group. When compared to software that has not been subject to the SDL, software that has undergone the SDL has experienced a significantly reduced rate of external discovery of security vulnerabilities. This paper describes the SDL and discusses experience with its implementation across Microsoft software.

All about the 'Case'

When installing SQL Server, regardless of versions and editions, SQL Server database administrators tend to choose the default collation and sort-order, which is SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS. Though case insensitiveness makes the life of the database developers and database administrator's easy, there are situations where case sensitivity should be enforced just as password checking is enforced.

In this article, I would like to discuss different methods for achieving case sensitivity in a case insensitive database/server.

Customizing SQL Server Reporting Services with .NET Code

With the release of Reporting Services, Microsoft has provided a truly enterprise-level reporting solution. Reporting Services provides support for the entire reporting life cycle including report authoring, report management, and report delivery

SQL Server 2005 Security - Part 4

In this article, we will conclude our coverage of security related changes in SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 (although we will continue discussion of improvements in other functionality areas throughout the reminder of this series). The topics we will focus on here are code and module signing, modifications of SQL Server Agent and SQL Profiler operations, as well as monitoring and auditing changes.

Creating a User Defined Aggregate with SQL Server 2005

SQL Server doesn't have a Product aggregate function. A recent blog post by Karen Watterson pointed out that Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q89656: Simulating a PRODUCT() Aggregate Function discusses how to achieve the Product aggregate functionality using the POWER function. We e-mailed about it and she challenged me to create a Product aggregate in SQL Server 2005. I decided to accept the challenge.

SQL Server 2000 Security - Part 6 - Ownership and Object Permissions

We have described, so far, authorization based on a predefined fixed server (determining a set of SQL server-wide privileges) and database (applying to database objects and activities) roles. We have also discussed application roles, which makes the level of permissions independent of those assigned to a SQL Server login or a database user account. Now it is time to look into permissions from the point of view of database objects. There are two main factors that play a role in determining how access rights to them are evaluated - their ownership and custom permissions. We will discuss the first one of these topics in this article and will continue with the other one in the next installment of this series.