Silverlight Applications

Tim Sneath: From A to Z... 50 Silverlight Applications

It's great to see so many Silverlight-based widgets, samples, demos and applications appearing out there. I spent a happy hour this morning searching around the Internet for examples and samples, and thought I'd aggregate the fruits of my research below.

Especially check out the Airlines Demo and the Amazon Search Visualization

SQL Server: Temporarily Changing an Unknown Password of the sa Account

Temporarily Changing an Unknown Password of the sa Account
Handy process for temporary changing SA password then changing it back, for those times when SA password is not known (was not documented and DBA who installed it is gone). Also, could be used to change unknown SA password, assuming that you are willing to put up with and fix possible broken apps/processes using the old SA password.

SQL Server Performance Impact of Procedure Calls without Owner Qualification -- SQL Server 2000

Linchi Shea : Performance Impact of Procedure Calls without Owner Qualification -- SQL Server 2000

The first thing to note is that on SQL Server 2005, the performance degradation caused by procedure calls without owner qualification was less than 5% with 100 or more concurrent users, whereas on SQL Server 2000 the performance degradation with exactly the same test workload was between 15% and 26% with 100 or more concurrent users.

Also interesting to note is the performance increase for SQL Server 2005:

With procedure calls owner qualified, SQL Server 2005 showed 15~18% improvement over SQL Server 2000 under heavy load. With procedure calls not owner qualified, SQL Server 2005 improved transaction throughput by a whopping 35~55% under heavy load.

Doug Seven : Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Joint Launch Announced

Doug Seven : Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Joint Launch Announced

Note that "Visual Studio 2008 will be released before the end of the year".