A quick list of relevant [to me] tools as they relate to working on or around SQL Server for maintenance and development.

• The folks at xSQL Software produce great tools that work without too much flash, although some DO have “all the bells and whistles”.  Go ahead and download their free offerings here.
• SSMS Tool Pack.  Dude, dude, dude… what can I say… phenomenal (and after a month of using them, indispensable) add on to SSMS 2005 on…  There is some code gen goodness there, some “refactoring”, snippets, debugging capability, etc... I can’t see how you wouldn’t be able to find a good use for this add on if you are a somewhat “daily” SQL Server and SSMS user.
• SQLMonitoring Tool.  Available on Codeplex.
• SSIS Community Tasks and Components.  Available on Codeplex.
• SQL Search from RedGate software.  I’ve blogged about it before here.  It has to make this list though… I use it pretty much “daily”.
• [UPDATE] The MEGA Guide to Free SQL Tools

An additional not on the offerings from xSQL Software: For those that are not free, the cost of their software is WAY less that their value.  You can’t go wrong.  I am a user of their tools, more specifically their Script Executor Community Edition which has saved me hours of frustrating, repetitive and manual work.  (Review to follow soon).

Use CPUID to get some processor details.  If you have an Intel processor, you could look for support to the VT-x instruction.

Your first step however should be to check against the list Intel maintains to with details for all processors that support virtualization, here.

If you have an AMD processor, this AMD tool should help you determine whether your processor supports hardware virtualization or not.

Want to use this short post as sort of planning slate for some things I want to do, loosely defined as goals, for the current month of May 2010 in the realm of training (in diverse formats) and some posts I want to write which in themselves would imply some training and thought organization exercise.

I recently completed the process of deploying TFS 2010.  Used mainly as a production SCM but also leveraging some basic ALM features.  This included conversion from Visual Source Safe, bug & issue item tracking and sprint tasks planning & reporting.  I want to “document” that process and highlight some of the gotchas that I went through, and the dos and don’t that I gathered from my experience. I think they’d add value to anyone else looking to do just that: Deploy TFS 2010 as a source control repository, migrate projects and get the groove going to plan and track your development projects.  I think a critical part of this process is indeed the planning phase, as the execution is pretty straight forward once you have a good solid base plan.

Sometime in the next 2 weeks, i will be rebuilding my ESXi box, because the PS took a crapper and I was just waiting for an excuse to upgrade the iron anyways.  As it was this is 3.5 environment because the proc was an oldie but goodie 32bit.  Looking to migrate to ESXi 4.  I am running 2 instances of Server 2003, 2 of Server 2008 and I will now look to add 2008 R2.  Here I ran my labs, and most recently had my TFS environment.  Great excuse to do it all over again if I wanted to, but for now it is just a host box swap keeping the VMs as they are.

Videos, podcasts, screencasts, MIX10 content I haven’t assimilated, and hopefully get suckered into it enough to justify a yearly subscription to tekpub.

I will attend the 2 day WebCamp event in Chicago over June 11th and 12th.  Suffice it to say, this is a great chance to learn from others including industry and technology leaders at Microsoft.  Topics include ASP.NET MVC, EF, JQuery, IIS, etc.  Great stuff.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I am considering, and haven’t yet decided, working on a worthy submission to Thomson Reuter’s mobile app contest, which they named The StreepApps Challenge .  I think I can convince my buddy Benny to go in with me on this project and if so, we are half way there.

All of this while I embrace the search and quest for a new full time role.  This time I am not looking for a job, I am looking for a home amongst those that are “my peeps”, those that appreciate what I bring to the table, people whom I can actually learn from… an environment that generates “good” stress.

On the path to my new “8 to 6” home, I am hoping to get my hands filthy dirty with some good code, good problems to solve, great challenges that push my limits and all nighters that leave you with a smile on your face.

So ok, slight inaccuracy in the post tile, because May…be some of the things that are listed here I’ll be doing in June.

I demoed this small, simple and free tool to the team today.  SQL Search from redgate

This is an add on for SQL Server Management Studio.  It supports/works with SQL Server 2005 & 2008 instances.  I won’t index or search databases under a SQL Server 2000 instance.  We migrated a SQL Server 2000 database and ran it under a 2008 instance in compatibility mode and SQL Search worked on it ok.

Once the install is complete, you’ll notice a new toolbar button:

Select your database within your object explorer and the click on the button and SQL Search will open up in a tab with the database selected on the left as the default selected database.  Of course you can select a different database to search within using the SQL Search interface.

Within the search box, type the name of the object (table, column, constraint, variable… whatever) you want to search for, and SQL Search does an immediate search on matches to partial names displaying the results in the grid below the search & selection criteria section.

Once you find what you are looking for you can “double-click” on it and it will find and select the object within the object explorer for you (mine is on the left).

An even more productive feature is that within the results grid itself there is a preview, read-only pane that displays the body of stored procedures as you select them on the grid above.  Want to mess around with it?  Double click it and navigate directly to the object from where you can proceed as you would within SSMS to “Modify” it.

Instant sensation with my team of developers & DBA.

Did I mention it is free?

Get it here.  And while you are there, watch the 3min video on where and how they went about building this tool.  Pretty neat.  “Coded by the sea”.

According to Baseline Magazine, you should make room on your bookshelf for the following books:

1. Managing the Human Factor in Information Security: How to win over staff and influence business managers by David Lacey
2. Information Nation: Seven Keys to Information Management Compliance by Randolph Kahn, Barclay Blair
3. The Truth About Middle Managers: Who They Are, How They Work, Why They Matter by Paul Osterman
4. Strategic Project Management Made Simple: Practical Tools for Leaders and Teams by Terry Schmidt
5. Growing Software: Proven Strategies for Managing Software Engineers by Louis Testa
6. Identifying and Managing Project Risk: Essential Tools for Failure-Proofin​g Your Project by Tom Kendrick PMP
7. The Greening of IT: How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment by John Lamb
8. Winning the Hardware-Softwa​re Game: Using Game Theory to Optimize the Pace of New Technology Adoption by Ruth D. Fisher
9. The Deciding Factor: The Power of Analytics to Make Every Decision a Winner by Larry E. Rosenberger
10. Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects (Pragmatic Programmers) by Johanna Rothman

Once I stumble across a list like this, I’ll likely read a couple… already ordered one of them.

Fresh off the production line, a P2V tool by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, formerly of Sysinternals.

The tool is called Disk2Vhd and this is the 1.0 offering, and is now part of the Sysinternals Suite.

Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online.

This assumes “other” tools require you to power down the system you wish to create an image of.  I guess this sounds reasonable to expect, and since I haven’t used either tool yet, I am not one to make a judgment call.

I am turning my old Dell 600SC server into a virtual host exclusively and in doing so I need to P2V it and store that image on my new NAS and then host it virtually amongst other environments I plan to add.  These tools are now a critical component of that plan and my plan is to write a post about the process and results once I get to doing it.

I just signed up for a 24/7 Web Monitoring service, and granted it is probably a startup and probably going through growing pains, I still couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony.

I needed a virtual machine to test an application in isolation and realized I didn’t have any of my .vhd images on hand.  

I looked around and came across this collection of downloadable VHDs directly from Microsoft, pre-activated, for both Vista and XP with different versions of IE including IE6 (XP only), IE7 & IE8.

The OSes are trial versions (of course) and expire January 1st for the XP installs and 120 days after first use for the Vista images.

Images require at least 1.5GB of HD space once expanded, so make sure you have some room available for it.

I recently came across Microsoft StyleCop, that analyzes the code, within the IDE for style.  This includes things like naming conventions, formatting and other matters of visual appeal.  It differs from FxCop in that it doesn’t check for use patterns, it simply checks style. 

I’ve been looking at this tool in order to implement it at work, where we have a pretty consistent and adhered to coding standard, who’s style enforcement could be done by a tool and save some people some time.

In any case, I am sure most of you are familiar with it but I deemed it worth noting, writing about and referencing.

The team’s blog is a great resource for help, release announcements, and general information about the tool.

The tool itself is available here in its latest 4.3 release. 

Quick note to link to the training kit released with the advent of .NET 3.5 SP1.

Complete kit with presentation & events materials, hands on labs and demos on:

• ASP.NET MVC
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• ASP.NET AJAX History
• ASP.NET Routing
• ADO.NET Data Services
• ADO.NET Entity Framework
• WCF 3.5 SP1
• .NET Framework Client Profile