Happy 20th Birthday Visual Basic!

(Extracted from http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vbteam/archive/2011/05/20/happy-20th-birthday-visual-basic.aspx#10167227)

May 20, 2011

Twenty years ago, May 20th, 1991 at Windows World, in Atlanta, Microsoft founder Bill Gates demoed Visual Basic 1.0. Twenty years later, the 10th version of this latest in an unbroken line of Microsoft BASIC languages stretching back to Microsoft’s founding is still going strong. When you look back over the history of a tool that’s been around that long you start to see some familiar experiences from Wetware products (commonly called children 😛 ): The cute and cuddly days of its youth, in the 16-bit era; the awkward teen years and the transition to .NET; sibling rivalry with the new baby (C#); and finally getting those braces … er, underscores off :). And now, finally out of those turbulent teen years, a matured language looks to the future. Visual Basic has always had a personality for humanizing programming and with Async methods in vNext it continues that tradition.

You might ask after two-decades how VB can keep re-inventing itself to face modern and future challenges. The answer is quite literally that – re-inventing itself. OK, more accurately re-writing itself. The VB compiler is being re-written from the ground up in Visual Basic and its syntactic and semantic analysis services exposed through a managed API that exposes parse trees, expression binding, assembly production (and more) to enable a world of new scenarios including REPL, VB as a scripting language, and more. It’s all very exciting! As a VB user for … half my lifetime, now, it’s great to look back and be proud of where VB has been, happy with where it is, and especially excited about where it’s going!

I have many fond memories of Visual Basic and likewise great aspirations for its future and I know millions of customers out there have the same. Please, share your stories (and hopes), and join me in wishing our old 😛 friend, VB, a Happy 20th Birthday and many more! 😀

New Features in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

(Extracted from http://www.mytechmantra.com/LearnSQLServer/Microsoft_SQL_Server_2008_R2.html)

By: Editor
May 14, 2009

Introduction

At TechED 2009, Microsoft has announced the launch of SQL Server 2008 R2 which was also known to the SQL Server Community by its code name Kilimanjaro. Microsoft will release SQL Server 2008 R2, first Community Technical Preview (CTP) during the second half of 2009. SQL Server 2008 R2 provides lot many new features and capabilities for Business Intelligence users which can be leveraged by many organizations around the world.

Overview of New Features in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 introduces lot many new features for Business Intelligence users, Developers and Database Administrators. This article gives you an overview of some of the new features in SQL Server 2008 R2.

Capitalize on Hardware Innovation

There was always a demand from customers to increase the number of logical processors supported in SQL Server. In SQL Server 2008 R2 the number of logical processors supported has been increased from 64 to 256 and it will take advantage of the multi-core technology. This will help improve performance and scalability for very large data warehousing applications.

Optimize Hardware Resources

This is a great new feature for database administrators as it will provide a real time insight into Server Utilization, Policy Violations etc. This feature will help organizations to strictly apply organization wide policies across servers thereby helping them maintain a healthy system.

Manage Efficiently at Scale

This feature will help database administrator to gain insight into growing applications and databases thereby helping them to ensure better management of database servers.

Enhance Collaboration Across Development and IT

Database Application development will be more closely integrated with Visual Studio 2010 which will help to ensure higher quality during the application development along with easier deployments and better handling of changes over time.

Master Data Services (MDS)

A Master Data Service (MDS) is a kind of data service that is responsible for: managing, in a single place, the uniqueness, integrity, quality, and interrelationships between the data that matters the most. This will improve the quality of your data because of centralized approach of defining; deploying and managing master data thereby ensure reporting consistency across systems.

Build Robust Analytical Applications

Using Microsoft Office Excel 2010 you can build robust analytical applications which will allow in-memory, column oriented processing engine to allow users to interactively explore and perform complex calculations on millions of data at lightening speeds. Using Microsoft Excel 2010 you can easily integrate data from multiple sources such as corporate databases, spreadsheets and external data sources.

Share and Collaborate with Confidence

Using Microsoft Office SharePoint 2010 users can easily publish reports to SharePoint sites thereby making it available across the organizations. The other advantage is that the reports can be refreshed automatically and you can also maintain version controlling and tracking using SharePoint. Once you start using Microsoft Office SharePoint the SharePoint Administrators will have the ability to set server policies and monitor them more effectively thereby securing the business critical information.

Support for Geospatial Visualization

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 will provide support for geospatial visualization including mapping, routing, and custom shapes. It will also support SQL Spatial and will also provide integration with Microsoft Virtual Earth tiles.