Hi everyone!

It is again the time of the SQL-Server & ASP.NET conference and we are here at the place, so that you won't miss it, even if you didn't have time to attend this year.

Introduction to Microsoft SQL Server - Armin Neudert

As last year, Armin did two subsequent introductory sessions about Microsoft SQL Server. This year, his sessions were based on the brand new version SQL Server 2005 which has just been launched on Monday this week.

Armin first gave us an overview over the features built into SQL Server. Here he mentioned some impressing numbers regarding the scalability SQL Server offers. Just to mention a few examples:

• maximum size of a database: 1.048.516 TB
• 2.147.483.647 database objects per database
• 32.767 databases on a single server

After that we learned what makes up the SQL Server platform. Armin shortly explained what the Integration, Analysis, Reporting, Notification and Replication Services could do for us.

He then went through the installation process, explaining what all the settings we can make are about. We learned about the components, tools and services that are available on your machine after running the SQL Server setup routine. Armin explained all the things about SQL Server architecture and everything we need to know regarding the first steps of database administration - including how to create Stored Procedures and Triggers - and running queries with SQL Server Management Studio.

After that he explained the differences between the available SQL Server editions and everything we need to know about licensing. A very interesting edition of SQL Server is the Express edition. It is free and we may redistribute freely as well. Armin pointed out that we have to install the .NET Framework 2.0 and Windows Installer 3 before we can install the Express edition. The online documentation is also available as a separate download. In contrast to the SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE), a reduced management tool is available for the Express Edition. Management Studio Express is currently available as a November Community Technology Preview version.

In the second session, Armin then covered topics important for production use of SQL Server. We learned about SQL Server authentication, how to create logins and database users, what server and database roles are, etc. After that, Armin explained and showed us how to make backups and restore databases, how to create maintenance plans and how we can get notification for alerts from the SQL Server Agent service. The last part of these two sessions dealt with replication.

Intro SQL-Server reporting services - Dan Jurden

SQL Reporting services are nothing new in the recently shipped version of SQL Server 2005. It has been around for quite a while.

It is basically a report engine, allowing you to create, distribute and use reports directly from the database server. It also provides an enormous flexibility. If you are missing an output format or on the other hand have a specific data source to load as an input, you can teach the server to handle it using your custom-made components.

The core three components of the SQL Reporting Services are Report Manager, Report Server and Report Server Database.

The Report Manager is responsible for setting up all the details around your report. It is a web application installed directly on your web server. Report Server is a web service that handles SOAP and URL requests, evaluates them and then executes the queries to actually get the data to create the report. It also provides a caching and security mechanisms. Report Database Server serves as storage for the report data, such as report definitions, metadata, cached reports, snapshots and resources. It also contains security and scheduling information.

In reality, when a report is requested, the report definition and the actual data are retrieved from the database by processing the queries and a report in an intermediate format is produced. That can be cashed for a later use and/or can be directly rendered into HTML, PDF or any other format of your choice.

This is the second and also the last day of the conference. Here are today's reports.

How the core ASP.NET engine works - Rick Strahl

This session, as it is usually the case with Rick's sessions, provided a detailed insight into the actual low-level architecture of ASP.NET.

First of all, Rick stressed out that ASP.NET is not only just the Web Forms and Web Services, as it is generally thought. These are only two sophisticated implementations sitting on top of a much more complex architecture, the ASP.NET framework.

The ASP.NET was actually developed from 90% in the .NET itself (C# to be exact) and by being so versatile it also provides a stable foundation for upcoming technologies like Indigo. The basic task of the framework is to take care about transporting the requests from the front-end to the back-end and to finally hand them to the target application that actually processes the request.

Since the pipeline of the ASP.NET framework goes through many interrelated objects, it is possible to hook in at almost any level of the processing. With such flexibility you can easily achieve things for which you had to create your own ISAPI in the past.

All that said, Rick then went through, explained and on examples demonstrated the internals and the possible hooks on the way of getting the request from the Web browser up to the specific application responsible for handling the request at the server.

Unit Testing in VS.NET 2005 - Dan Jurden

Modern strategies in a software development suggest using business objects as a foundation for the database applications. They encapsulate the (business) logic and basically everything concerning the object directly inside them. The real pain comes when you need to test them. To test all the business objects, their methods and properties so that you know that there are no (understand not many) bugs in the individual parts you cannot just run the application as a whole - there is none at that time. You need to write dedicated tests.

This approach is called unit testing. It also suggests writing the test before the actual implementation of the business objects. The implementation should be done after running the first test (surprisingly) with all the tests marked failed. Then the steps of the implementation should be aimed at making the individual tests to pass one by one. The golden rule is not to write more or less code, just to make sure that you write exactly the amount of code that is needed for the test to pass.

To create the tests you basically have two options. You can either write them manually or let them be generated for you. Earlier, Visual Studio developers used to use the NUnit tool for that purpose. Today, shortly after the release of the Visual Studio 2005, there is a new tool integrated right into the IDE. It is called unit testing, but is only available in the Visual Studio Team Edition for Testers.

Dan then continued with examples. He created a very simple business object from scratch and then showed some of the powerful possibilities the unit testing in VS 2005 offers, such as the expected exception, asserts, data driven tests, code coverage, and a few more.

Microsoft SQL Server DTS - Sebastian Flucke

First, Sebastian (as always with the fox on his shoulder) gave us an overview on what we can do with SQL Server Data Transformation Services (DTS). He then explained that DTS is a technology built into SQL Server 2000 and that the new version of DTS in SQL Server 2005 is now called Integration Services.

Sebastian told us that DTS is a powerful tool that can do a lot more than imports and exports. It provides the possibility to visually or programmatically create workflows for complex import, export and data transformation processes. These processes can be created using a visual designer and can be stored as so-called packages that can be executed directly or scheduled.

After this, Sebastian showed us how to create a DTS package from scratch and told us that we can not only use the Visual Basic scripting language for making data transformations and other tasks. Furthermore, we can create Visual FoxPro COM server DLLs that can be included in DTS packages.

Finally, Sebastian gave us a quick overview on the enhancements in SQL Server 2005 Integration Services.

Acknowledgements

We would like to say thank you to Pavel Celba, Raphael and Eugen Wirsing, who provided an enormous ammount of nice pictures. This was a great help and that is why the picture archive is so huge this time!

And again, as every year, a big thank you to Rainer and his Team consisting of Tina, Andelko and Sven for providing a great event, everyone really enjoyed. We are looking forward for the next year's conference.

Our extended thanks goes also to Michel Fournier, for enabling the UT, so that we can share this wonderful moment with all of you out there!

At this point we would like to remember Brent Speedie who was a great help proofreading our text the last two years. He and Drew were really missed here.

Armin Neudert, TMN Systemberatung GmbH   Armin is co-owner and one of two managing directors of TMN Systemberatung GmbH located in Ilsfeld (near Stuttgart, Germany that’s where the Mercedes and the Porsches come from). Armin’s first experiences with FoxPro have been with FoxPro for Windows 2.6. Over the years he worked in large projects where he got experience with MS SQL Server, UML, Multi Tier Architecture, COM+, Visual Basic, etc. Armin uses Visual FoxPro as his main development tool. Since 1994 he is a Regional Director for the German FoxPro UserGroup dFPUG. He arranges monthly meetings in the area of Stuttgart, where he often does sessions, keeps people up to date with the latest information and keeps the FoxPro community together. Armin is also a speaker at other user group meetings in Germany and at the German FoxPro conference in Frankfurt. Armin is also a Microsoft Certified Professional for Visual FoxPro.

Jan Vít, Vitsoft   Jan Vít is a student of the University Of Economics in Prague. Since 1993 he has been actively interested in programming as well as other areas of information technology. His computer experience started with PC 80386 with FoxPro 1.02, later followed by higher versions for the DOS platform and since 1999 he has been using the newest Visual FoxPro versions together with other programming languages and tools. Presently he spends most of his time with Visual FoxPro 9.0, MS SQL Server and C# in WinForms as well as WebForms development. He has been a regular speaker on the Czech Visual FoxPro DevCons since 2004 and is also the co-author of many DevCon conference reports from Prague and Germany. His work now mainly consists of developing software for pharmacies.