Jackie Goldstein's Weblog

Rajesh George from the SQL Server Express (SSE) team has posted a nice, clear article on MSDN with an overview of the main features and differences of SQL Server 2005 Express.   You should walk away with a good understanding of how it differs from the standard SQL Server 2005 product as well as how it differs from MSDE (SQL 2000).

If you attended the MS Israel .NET Deep Dive event last week, please take a moment to fill out this speaker feedback form. Please forward this link to any friend or colleagues that you know attended as well.  I very much value attendee, even if they don't take the take (as many do) to send a personal email.

If your VB.NET 2003 solution has more than about 100K lines of code and you get phantom (i.e. false) error messages when compiling,  there is now a hotfix available for this, as decribed in this KB article.

One of the more interesting and surprising feedbacks that I got from my presentation on .NET Worst Practices at the .NET Deep Dive developer event was how many experienced .NET developers didn't realize the significance of the difference between "throw" and "throw ex"  (both in C# and VB).   I thought that I would explain and show it here, but one of the conference attendees (and an XML MVP) already did it forme on his blog - so check out Oleg's entry that summarizes my explanation of this issue.  He also includes a comparison to the Throw keyword in Java.

November's Israel Visual Basic User Group Meeting will be held on December1, 2004:

Yesterday we broke a new record for a single-day Microsoft developer event in Israel.  It was tagged .NET Deep Dive  and consisted of 2 parallel tracks: (1) Practices and Utilities and (2) Hardcore Programming, preceeded by a keynote on some new Team System features of VS2005.  What was amazing was the number of attendes that showed up - over 1,600 !!  

I have fallen behind a bit on my blogging - but that is good news. Business activity is really picking up and keeping me very, very busy. I was in New York to formally sign a contract for a new project that will be developed with VS2005 and have several other potential projects in various stages of negotiations that need to be attended to.  Upon my return I also had to finish up final preparations for the Microsoft Israel .NET Deep Dive event which I helped manage and spoke at.  More on that in my next post.

My article on the new DataSet features in ADO.NET 2.0 has gone live on MSDN.