I wouldn't normally recommend subscribing to an aggregate feed, but I'm giving vbfeeds a try (via Bill Vaughn, a long time ago). The site states, on the "About" page: vb:feeds is personal project by Serge Baranovsky. The purpose of this web site is to aggregate Visual Basic/.NET related posts on the Net while keeping unrelated posts filtered out. This site aggregates Visual Basic/.NET related web feeds from blogs, forums and other Visual Basic sites. Most technical weblogs have personal and social aspect to them. All posts collected on vb:feeds go through a review process before appearing on the site and...

...I broke my mouse. It happened when my boss and another staff member were standing in my office, and while they were talking I took a quick moment to recompile and run something - when that something didn't run, I slammed the mouse down in (mock?) frustration, and it broke. In my defense, I was only mucking around! Normally I wouldn't so such a stupid thing. But I did it nonetheless, and I'm particularly embarrassed. My boss is OK with it, and he's asked me to order a new mouse (I've gone back to using an old one), so the hunt for The...

I have had to produce crosstab/pivot queries from SQL Server 2000 before, and it ain't pretty. Typically the data is stored in rows, and the data in one field needs to be turned into a column header. To cut straight to the chase, here's an article and stored procedure on SearchSQLServer.com that will do exactly that: A simple way to perform crosstab operations By Brian Walker Brilliant! One note: you don't have to put this stored proc in master, it can go in any database. Keep reading to find my slower, non-dynamic SQL way to do it. Here's some psuedo-code...

I finally started on my new project using ASP.NET 2.0 and Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005. I'm using an older Pentium 3/512MB RAM machine that I had sitting around which has performed adequately, but I literally can't wait to use Visual Studio - a known memory hog - on my main development machine, a Pentium 4 2.8GHz Hyper Threading machine with 1GB of RAM. Beta 2 has worked OK for me, and depending on what I'm working on I experience 1 or 2 "The Visual Basic compiler needs to restart - no work has been lost"-type messages a day....

Last Tuesday Itzik Ben-Gan returned to the Melbourne SQL Server User Group meeting, to talk about row numbers in SQL 2000 as well as SQL 2005. I missed Itzik's presentation earlier this year (fool that I am), but everyone I spoke to about it gave Itzik a big rap. And after hearing him on Tuesday, he certainly deserves lots of credit for his inventive problem-solving and effective teaching style. Itzik was *so* smart that I had a brain mini-meltdown at around 7:00 trying to work out an answer for a problem he posed (a "why won't this work"-type question). It's not...

Miguel points out that the PDC 2005 PowerPoint sessions can be downloaded from http://commnet.microsoftpdc.com/content/downloads.aspx. I'm going to troll through them and pick a couple of interesting ones to look at.