The site connect.microsoft.com is a wonderful concept: you can provide feedback about the Microsoft products, report bugs and give suggestions directly to the teams responsible for those products. People can vote on items to indicate them as more important. At least, that's the theory. It's been known that the communication from Microsoft can be improved. For example: bugs that are closed as "by design" of "not reproducible" without any (or very little) feedback from Microsoft. Don't get me wrong, also a lot of good stuff happens on that site. But two of these "miscommunications" got a bit on my nerve the last few days.

I went to Amsterdam (and Antwerp) for 12 days recently and was shocked at the rates that AT&T charges for roaming. Take a look at the following screenshot You might think those prices aren’t too bad, but you need to pay attention, scroll down to the bottom of the message, here is what you see AT&T will charge you $19.97 per MB for roaming if you don’t take one of those 3 packages. Imagine if you by mistake download an 8 MB picture because you forgot to turn roaming off, that is one expensive picture. These prices are just too much, all the operators in the world should have some kind of agreement and then they can charge you a little more for roaming but certainly not $19.97 per MB. I know one person who recently went to Mexico for 4 days and got charged an extra $300. I think $20 or $30 per week for roaming should be more than enough to cover any so called costs that the operators are incurring because of someone going to a different country with their cell phone.

Charts in SSRS are invaluable – they allow you to view data graphically. It is much easier to tell a story with pictures than with text and numbers. SSRS has a default set of color combinations for charts. Let’s face it, they aren’t pretty. Here’s a sample line chart. The default color palette is “BrightPastel”. What if those colors don’t work for you? Maybe you want a lighter or darker palette. Maybe you want to incorporate corporate colors. Maybe the budding interior designer in you is emerging. Can you change them? Yes!

One week from now I will be arriving in Iowa City to kick off my SQL Saturday #239, East Iowa experience! I am honored to have been selected to speak at this event and am very much looking forward to it. I have never been to the East Iowa SQL Saturday but everyone I know who has, simply raves about the manner in which it is run. I will be presenting An Optimistic Approach: Snapshot Isolation in SQL. If you would like to learn about one of the more powerful, but least understood, aspects of SQL Server, I’ll be in Room 2520B starting at 4PM!

Success is an interesting concept. Even more interesting when you make the effort to decide if you are successful and at what level of success you’ve achieved. To further blow your decision making ability on the topic, imagine the thought of if you should, could or would achieve more success. In order to determine the level of success we’ve achieved or can achieve, we really need a definition of success. In the Wikipedia definition, this is said to be referred to be a level of social status (respect), achievement of a goal, or simply, the opposite of failure. We’re move back to why failure can mean success but for now, we’ll continue on defining, or attempting to define success.

One of the many things that I enjoy about serving as Chapter Leader of PASSMN, is the opportunity to bring in a nationally recognized speaker for one of our monthly meetings. Our meeting next week will be one of these opportunities. PASSMN is pleased to welcome author, SQL Server MVP, and SSIS Expert Brian Knight ( t | b ) to speak at our July 2013 meeting. Brian is the owner and founder of Pragmatic Works and literally wrote the book on SSIS. We are very excited about this opportunity and are expecting an overflow crowd.

The other day I succumbed to the urge to upgrade my customized version of MVC Music store from ASP.Net MVC3 to MVC4. I had just finished watching Steve Sanderson’s excellent TechDays 2012 session, C#5, ASP.NET MVC 4, and asynchronous Web applications (if you’re doing ASP.Net MVC and haven’t watched it, queue it up, awesome presentation). During the presentation, Steve used Apache Bench to show the improvements as he upgraded his small project from synchronous MVC4 to asynchronous MVC4, which got me wondering what effect MVC4 and Asynchronous MVC4 would show during the wcat load test step in my MVC Music Store build process.

To prepare myself for my session Data Visualization Tips & Tricks, I read a few books. In this blog post, I'll give a short review for each one of them. Information Dashboard Design This book, written by Stephen Few, was the first one I read. And it was a fascinating read! I went through the book in one long haul. It's very well written and the design of the book is very well done. A big plus is that the printed version of the book is in color.

My goal for this build was to build the app, run unit test, make a nuget package of one of the projects and then publish the nuget package somewhere that makes sense. I made the misstake of just using the defaults for teamcity and the default is to execute the next step only if the previous step finishes succesfully, meaning you get an exit code 0. I even made a nice diagram for it.

It’s the second Tuesday of the month, and you know what that means: it’s T-SQL Tuesday! This is a monthly blog series with a different topic each month. This month, our host, Bradley Ball (blog | twitter), wants to hear about at least one moment in SQL time that I would like back. (You can write about your moment, too – the information you need is here!) Remember that time I didn’t know how to configure a cluster?