Welcome to Women In Technology week at SQL University! This is a great blog project put together by Jorge Segarra (Twitter | Blog), and contributed to by many SQL professionals. If you aren’t a student yet, head over to the website and get started! This week, you get to meet a fantastic group of women, all of whom work with SQL Server and are involved in the community. These women are smart, talented, driven and amazing. We’re going to talk about how we got involved in technology, how we encourage children to think about tech as a career path, and what you can do to help! You’ll get to meet Audrey Hammonds (Twitter | Blog), Julie Smith (Twitter | Blog), Jen McCown (Twitter | Blog) and Wendy Pastrick (Twitter | Blog). And then, there’s me….

Tomorrow I will start a 6 month attempt to document my application. Management has decided that it would be nice that someone could take over when I will be absent for a longer period of time or for when I find another job. I can only agree with their point of view. It would however be easy for me to say that my code is full of automated tests and the code is well layered and thus completely understandable, but that would not be taking into account that someone would need to earn the decisions I took to get what I have now. Someone would also have to learn the why an how our business works and that would be the hard part. So we invited over three independent consultants and asked what they would need to make it easy on them to step in if I was no longer there to help them. All three came with the same answer. Technical and functional analysis is what would make it easier on them to get up to speed quickly. And as usual they all gave us a quote and we took the cheapest one ;-).

Introduction There are several ways you can keep your settings in your application. I can think of several and all have pros and cons. I will try to list the ones I use and why I would use them and why not. Constants Settings XML Table on a database server Resourcemanager Constants This is simple you make a class or module and you add some constants to it. Public Class Constants Public Const Constant1 As String = "Constant1" Public Const Constant1 As String = "Constant1" End Class``` <span class="MT_green">Pros</span> This is very simple, typesafe, very fast and easily refactorable. <span class="MT_red">Cons</span> Requires quite a bit of code in VB.Net. And you can&#8217;t change at runtime. ## Settings You can add a settings file via new item in any visual studio project you want. The files also have a .settings extension. Every setting ha a name, type, scope and value. The settings are actually a bit of XML with some T4-generated code attached to it. <div class="image_block"> <a href="https://lessthandot.z19.web.core.windows.net/wp-content/uploads/users/chrissie1/settings/settings.png?mtime=1299486179"><img alt="" src="https://lessthandot.z19.web.core.windows.net/wp-content/uploads/users/chrissie1/settings/settings.png?mtime=1299486179" width="794" height="181" /></a> </div> ```vbnet '------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ' &lt;auto-generated&gt; ' This code was generated by a tool. ' Runtime Version:4.0.30319.1 ' ' Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if ' the code is regenerated. ' &lt;/auto-generated&gt; '------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Option Strict On Option Explicit On &lt;Global.System.Runtime.CompilerServices.CompilerGeneratedAttribute(), _ Global.System.CodeDom.Compiler.GeneratedCodeAttribute("Microsoft.VisualStudio.Editors.SettingsDesigner.SettingsSingleFileGenerator", "10.0.0.0")&gt; _ Partial Friend NotInheritable Class Settings1 Inherits Global.System.Configuration.ApplicationSettingsBase Private Shared defaultInstance As Settings1 = CType(Global.System.Configuration.ApplicationSettingsBase.Synchronized(New Settings1()),Settings1) Public Shared ReadOnly Property [Default]() As Settings1 Get Return defaultInstance End Get End Property &lt;Global.System.Configuration.UserScopedSettingAttribute(), _ Global.System.Diagnostics.DebuggerNonUserCodeAttribute(), _ Global.System.Configuration.DefaultSettingValueAttribute("testvalue")&gt; _ Public Property test() As String Get Return CType(Me("test"), String) End Get Set(ByVal value As String) Me("test") = value End Set End Property End Class Pros

Some of us work extensively with SSIS and multi-instance SQL clusters. One of the headaches with SSIS in this type of set up, is that SSIS is not cluster aware. This includes where packages are saved when you upload them through SSMS. Now to give you the ability to save and manage SSIS packages on specific MSDB databases for a SQL cluster, we need to edited a file. The file can be found at this path:

Last year, I helped organized SQL Saturday in Chicago with two other people. On many occasions I have received feedback from speakers and attendees saying that SQL Saturday ranked in the top three out of all the SQL Saturday events they had attended. Feedback like that is truly inspiring. This year we’re bringing another SQL Saturday to the Chicago area. The organizer group this year includes a few more people and we’ve spread the duties out a bit to get things done better and more efficiently but everyone helps each other and it is making it much easier. One of my tasks, like last year, was the scheduling of the event. Last year I thought scheduling was difficult. I had no idea that it could get even more difficult until this year. In total, SQL Saturday in Chicago had 135 session submissions and just under half of those were from unique speakers. 

There are 13 new videos on channel 9 posted about SQL Server. The non-marketing videos (by engineering PMs) give customers peek into the goals and visions why certain SQL Server features were decided and implemented. Below is a list with a little blurb what the video is about. They have the following formats available High Quality WMV (PC, XBox, MCE) MP3 (Audio only) Medium Quality WMV (Lo-band, Mobile) High Quality MP4 (iPad, WP7)

Product Selection: 1: Identifying Needs 2: Requirements and Scoring 3: Evaluation 4: Review It was a long trip from “I want product ABC” to what we really ended up choosing and implementing. No process is perfect, no meeting goes as planned. After the product selection process is complete it’s time to review what went well, what fared poorly, and what we can try to improve the process. There are fifteen other tasks waiting, but taking some time to identify these factors is the first step to evolving our process towards an ultimate goal of less wasted motion in both the short and long terms. Some day we should be able to lift our heads and realize that we are not only selecting the best possible products for our needs, but doing so with less energy and resources then it originally took to simply pick one at random (with the random conversations, arguments, integration losses, and other baggage that incorporate that ‘process’).

SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 R2 Creating mailing labels is a common business need. From sending marketing postcards to prospects, to the annual Christmas cards for customers, labels are frequently used. Are you currently running a report to get your customers mailing information, then using Mail Merge in Microsoft Word to create the labels? Perhaps you are simply exporting the data out of the database. If so, there is an easier way!

Should I abandon VB.Net? This is a question that crosses my mind from time to time, but lately it is getting stronger. At least it would make my life simpler. Copy paste coding gets even better when you are a C# programmer since there are so much more examples out there. The community is bigger and better for C#. Even Microsoft discourages the use of VB.Net. If you ever go to something like techdays you will find that VB.Net is nowhere to be found. In that community you will be mocked and ridiculed if you tell them you are a VB.Net programmer. You are looked down upon, even by the spaghetti programmers. But then the .Net community seems to be rude and unfriendly whatever you do. I noticed that when I did my little powershell series over the weekend.

I started my journey on Thursday when [I tried to automate the task of closing Visual Studio][1] doing the git checkout and then starting Visual studio again. I failed on that account, and [I found that my win7 installation was a bit corrupt][2], but I got some good help and [a comment][3] that got me thinking. So I continued on my quest and on Saturday [I installed powerconsole][4] and [found what I could do with it][5]. By the end of the day and many blogposts later I found a solution that worked. Here is that solution.