SplaTT and Cameron Reilly talk about a 2005 Australian Blogging Conference. They're taking expressions of interest at http://www.splatt.com.au/blog/archives/aus_blogging_conference/index.html. Sounds great (although I hope it's in Melbourne).  

Mike Gunderloy points to “SQL Server 2000 Report Pack for Financial Reporting” sample reports from Microsoft. I found that the installer crashed on my W2K Server box with a cryptic error message, but ran OK on my XP Pro desktop (where are the error logs for these things?) I do have one gripe, while trying not to look the gift horse straight down the throat, that why is an installer required to deliver the RDL and MDB files? I reckon that maybe a copy of the database with instructions to attach it and the Visual Studio solution file and report files would be enough,...

I was all ready to link to David Ornstein, one of the writers of FlexWiki, which is a wiki written in C#, as he links to an Associated Press article describing the benefits of wikis. Then that article got superseded by David's news that FlexWiki is on SourceForge! I use FlexWiki here at work for documentation purposes and for my daily ToDo list (which keeps getting bigger and bigger). FlexWiki is great as it requires little setup (no SQL Server database), the user interface is customisable via stylesheets, and it just works (enough for even my manager to like what he sees). I...

Last week's SQL Server SIG at Microsoft was on CLR and Yukon, and was presented by Greg Low. I've seen Greg a while back presenting on “smart clients“ and he was good then. He hasn't lost his touch - Greg did a great job of mixing concepts and code (just enough code to digest at one time) on some of the new cool things that can be done with Yukon and VB.NET (or any other CLR language). The session was absolutely packed full of people. I had tried to register online during the day of the presentation only to be informed...

Via ActiveWin, comes Microsoft Research UI Prototypes. Some really interesting stuff, most mocked-up to be semi-functional in a browser, while others are just images. Cool.

Darrell Norton points out a tool to monitor SQL Server 2000, plus Reporting Services reports to view the data collected. I was aware of the Health and History tool before, but having these reports makes it more attractive. It's good to see reports designed for Reporting Services to cope with “enterprise” needs - I was fossicking around the Superior Software for Windows site the other day and noticed that they'd developed Reporting Services reports for Exchange. Also, the Reporting Services CD comes with reports to monitor usage of Reporting Services itself.

AjarnMark does a nice write up of "What's New In DTS 2005". I use DTS (Data Transformation Services, part of SQL Server) fairly frequently and love trying to find ways to encapsulate logic in a package, but wish it wasn't so hard!

I reckon Data Transformation Services in SQL Server 2000 are a good thing, and have used them to import and process text files into my databases. With a bit of mucking around you can do almost anything with DTS, like checking for file existence and setting the target database, among other things. You can even execute a DTS package from a stored procedure, which is perfect for calling from a custom user interface, setting global variables and doing extra processing. A rough example:DECLARE @rc INT, --return value from "exec" calls @pkg INT --pointer to package ('object token') --create...