Merry Christmas to all my reader(s). I hope you have a great Christmas and New Year, and I’ll see you in January! I thought it would be fitting to wrap up 2007 with a quick summary of my blog statistics, below. Number of posts for the year: 31 (plus this one, equals 32) 3 Most Viewed Posts According to Web and Aggregate View Stats - probably because they're the oldest .NET Code Generation Tools I've Tried DATEDIFF and Date Boundaries OT: 5 Meme 3 Most Commented Posts A Better Pager for the ASP.NET 2.0 GridView Tabs as 'the' feature, not 'a' feature Auditing Schema Changes to SQL Server 2005 objects Book Reviews Book...

BugTracker.NET's Corey Trager posts about "featuritis" - one simple definition is where continually adding features to software eventually pushes users beyond happiness. Corey references Kathy Sierra's original post which explains it a lot better than I can here (and has a nice graph too). I have two counter-arguments to the simple definition of "featuritis": discoverability, and user personas (to be fair, Kathy goes into a lot more detail and her post is well worth reading). If an application adds new features but makes them hard to discover, or does the opposite by adding new features and making the older ones harder to...

If so, then it's worth knowing that mainstream support ends April 2008 (via Andy Leonard, who asks "What's that ticking sound?") Tags: sql server, support, microsoft

Instead, use this basic "natural language" elapsed time function in VB.NET. I use this simple function to show elapsed time in the user interface. It came about because although I believe it's useful to provide some feedback at the end of long-running processes, I was getting sick of strings like "Time taken: 456.6 seconds" which is indecipherable to real people. This VB.NET function returns a string like "less than 10 seconds", "under 1 minute", "around 4 minutes" which, as you can see, changes the unit of measure depending on how long the elapsed time is:    '''      ''' Returns an approximate, rounded string of the difference in seconds, minutes or hours between the passed      ''' start and end DateTimes (depending on how long the difference is), to return feedback to the user      ''' on how long a process takes to run.     '''      ''' The starting or commencement time.     ''' The end or finish time.     ''' A natural-sounding sentence fragment that can be used after an opening like "The process finished ...

I haven't posted anything on Reporting Services recently. So, I have two links for the infamous matrix control: Advanced Matrix Reporting Techniques by David Leibowitz on Red Gate's Simple Talk site How to format the subtotals of a Reporting Services matrix differently, using InScope by fellow Aussie and SQL Server MVP Rob Farley Because I feel I need to compensate :-) Tags: sql server, database, reporting services, matrix