Blog ala Vidar

I was really looking forward to test this new CTP, because all its new features, including intellisence. I’ve wasted MANY hours on getting this to work! I was clever enough to remove SQL 2005 while I downloaded 2008. Why? Well, because the others CTPs have been stable, and I thought since November CTP has SO many new cool things, I don’t need 2005. Turns out, this CTP doesn’t work as well as expected.

First of all, it did have an upgrade-functionality (DOOOOH!), so uninstalling 2005 wasn’t necessary. Second of all, the uninstall-thing in 2005 didn’t work that well. Now my computer says I don’t have any 2005 installed, but wait… Why does management studio 2005 work? And by the way, why is the 2005 services still running? I’m not able to remove them, because “Add/remove programs” says they do not exist. But, I’ve learned to not trust “Add/remove programs”. The service is running, and HEY! I can query my local databases! @@version says 9, so no 2008. When I tried installing 2008 everything failed, except management studio and profiler, so I’ve got them in 2008 “mode”. 2008 management studio does not support 2000 quite well, but I see that as a good thing. I know some of you may get pissed off by my comment about this, but talking about 2000 is almost like talking about Windows 95. Yeah, we’ve all used it but we want to start using technology that’s been built in THIS century!

Anyhow, I remember the syntax of the most commonly used system SPs in 2000, so I’m at least able to write the queries for what I have to do in 2000. When I finally got management studio installed (after looking through logs at about 1MB), I started playing with the new features in this application. Intellisence is still under development, I hope, because this does not perform properly, at least not when I’m connected to other than local databases. Local database performs ok.

One other thing I’ve noticed is auto indenting. IN YOUR FACE! I’m really tired of reading through ugly code, so now you’re finally forced to at least indent 🙂 Maybe I shouldn’t mention that it’s possible to turn off both auto indenting and intellisence? Well, now you know. I think I’m going to turn these off, because I like those functions just as much as having a guy hanging over my shoulder and commenting my spelling-errors all the time. I know I make mistakes, but I am capable to correct them myself, thank you!

And one third thing is the syntax highlighting. It really annoys me that they have changed colours on various things. For example @@VERSION is now blue, SUSER_SNAME() is black. In 2005, these were pink or similar (I don’t know what all the colours are called). If this is done with purpose, I’ll send a mail to Microsoft telling them how much I like pink! Syntax highlighting make things much easier, I think. Especially when reading non-indented code.

I was really looking forward to diving into the filestream type. Maybe this can replace our filestore-system in a future AppFrameR3? Who knows!
Speaking of the devil. We watched a TechEd session about new features in 2008 today. No news, except a demo of the geometric and geographical data types with integration to Virtual Earth.