Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals

that's a heck of a name but oh well, you should be used to it by now; the point is, this looks very promising

The new Visual Studio Database Project allows you to import your database schema and place it under source control. When the time comes to deploy schema changes the new project system allows you to quickly build update scripts or packages and then provides a mechanism to deploy them to the database of our choice

Rename Refactoring allows you to easily rename any object in your database and be assured that all references to that object will be renamed to correspond to the change

DataCompare allows you to quickly compare two databases and script updates to bring the data in these databases into sync

and a lot more, check it out

hint: the page looks better in IE (than it does in FireFox) but don't let that discourage you

(not) managing developers

if you are managing developers or are thinking into moving in such position, be it software manager or assistant software manager, or something related to that (like managing overseas developers), this is definetely a must read

"The catch-22 of software management is that the ones who want it most are usually the worst at it. Some people, for worse or for worst, want to be managers because it gives them power over their peers. There's nothing good that can come of this arrangement: you should never give power to someone who craves it, for reasons that I hope are obvious."

"Unfortunately, many tech companies do exactly that, because they don't know any better."

I couldn't agree more, I guess developers can benefit from this as well, perhaps pass it on. you can find the article here

I'm back

not that I ever wrote on my blog that I was leaving on vacation, but anyway... I had a great time in Mexico, specifically in Juarez, Chihuahua and Cuauhtemoc (Chihuahua) with most of my family, unfortunately I missed some friends, which sucks because I don't get to go back very often...

Juarez is a great city to visit, there are tons of things to do there and the food is really good

I'm still catching up on reading blogs and stuff, I've found some good posts... back to reality

Free Intellisense for SQL Query Analyzer

for those of you who can't type fast intellisense lovers

couple this with my SQL Connection manager and you're good to go (I know, lame name)

• Code completion for fast, accurate script building
• Discoverability in SQL Server query creation
• Keyword formatting, code snippet integration other extended features
• FREE until 1st September 2006
• No time-bombs, no restrictions

go get it while is fresh

simple elegant way to read ini files (Delphi)

I still see people do weird things to load settings from an .ini file; I always use this method

uses
IniFiles;
...

with TIniFile.Create(Application.ExeName) do
try
//load the settings here
finally
Free
end

nice, short, clean and simple

my thing is whenever I find something simpler or nicer than the way I do things, I change to that new way and stick to that, I think that's a simple principle to keep on becoming better developer

Atlas Demo

in case you haven't seen it, check it out, very cool stuff

obfuscating the QueryString (just don't)

I just read this post by Peter A Bromberg, where he suggests that you can obfuscate the Query string to pass sensitive data around by "performing ASCII-to-HEX scrambling"; the guy usually has good ideas, but this one, please just don't use it, security through obscurity is not security

agile lunch?

I just read a post by Brendan Tompkins titled Agile HR; at work, we (the group of developers on our division) usually try to go out for lunch on Thursdays and yesterday we were going in two different cars and one guy said "remember that we have to go in pairs" (to get some discount because they had some coupon) to which I immediately replied "so this is going to be Agile lunch?"

then we started talking about agile practices and what we liked and didn't like, I won't post that here because I would probably get flamed, but anyway...
we're such geeks... do you guys do agile lunch?