This is just one of those times when I have to wonder who's calling the shots from a product perspective over at MS. I just started experimenting with Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals and have run into an absolute show stopper that completely prevents me from being able to do anything useful with the product.

First off, I mentioned a while back the fact that "regular" DB projects in VS2005 were cripppled. I have no clue why Microsoft, who often goes so far out of their way to provide backwards compatibility, would have gone and trashed DB projects the way they did. It became somewhat clear when VSTS4DBP was announced that they were trying to actually create a "real" product around database development and I was happy because I figured this new support would include all the features that I lost and more. Well, as it turns out, with all the cool, new things that VSTS4DBP offers, they STILL don't support DML/BCP in the product.

So, what does this mean exactly? It means that you're basically left hanging, looking for your own home-brewed solution, for any "static" data you may have in your databases. Most likely that means executing bcp on the command line to export data from your tables, adding those files to your project manually and then adding some BULK INSERT statements into the Script.PostDeployment.sql file of the project.

Scary thing is, this was brought up and Microsoft has said that they consider it great feedback... for the next version of the product. Ridiculous, right? Please voice your opinions via this bug over on Microsoft Connect.

Hot on the tails of a bunch of other great releases coming out of Redmond in these past couple of weeks, PowerShell v1.0 has been released!

I've been running on Vista for a while now. Unfortunately VS 2005 wasn't designed with a "least user priveledge" approach in mind and so it has some unsupported scenarios when running on Vista when UAC is turned on. Most stuff "just works", but there are a few things that require you to kick it into elevated permissions mode. Here's a FAQ Microsoft just released that provides workarounds those problems and a few others. Looks like we won't see full Vista support until the Q107 timeframe.

They're calling them Widget now, but essentially this is almost what the HTML Components specification from 1998 was trying to do. I do like the fact that includes a packaging mechanism (ZIP) so that you can distribute all your resources in on file.

Criticism follows:

• There should be a way to expose an interface for my widget (properties, methods, events) just like the HTML component specification. These could be declared in the config.xml.
• The config.xml should have a namespace.
• The "id" element... not sure it makes sense. Should probably be a URI.
• Naming Nitpicks:
• Should we use "index.html"? It already has meaning, why overload it? How about "widget.html"?
• The "widgetname" be camel-cased as "widgetName".
• Widget scripting interface's "preferenceForKey" should be "getPreferenceForKey".

So, if you haven't already heard, Windows Vista RTMd today and will be available for retail on 01/30/07 (just one day before my 30th birthday heheh). Congrats to all the developers, I'm sure it's been a hell of a journey. It must feel great to finally set it free.

Now... let's see... off the top of my head Microsoft is absolutely bombarding the market place right now.

Consumer wise we have:

• IE7
• Office 2007
• Vista
• XBox 360
• Dashboard Update
• HD-DVD Player
• Video Marketplace
• Gears of War (yeah baby!)
• Zune (coming next week!!!)

Developer wise we have:

• .NET 3.0 + VSTO 2007
• ASP.NET Ajax (beta 2)

Well, it's been a bit of a journey, but .NET 3.0 has arrived. Get all your WPF, WCF and WWF goodness right over here. Congrats to all the team members who got this platform out the door! Developing rich applications for Windows just got that much better.