My tenth Toolbox column in the October 2006 issue of MSDN Magazine is now avaiable online. The October issue examines two products:
- PreEmtive Solutions Dotfuscator (version 3.0) - obfuscate your .NET assemblies to protect your company's intellectual property. Obfuscation (IMO) is a must if you develop a product that is shipped to customers.
- NHibernate - quickly persist and retrieve information from a database using NHibernate to automate the process of building the necessary code and query capabilities. NHibernate is a free, open-source framework tool for quickly building a data access layer between your business objects and data store.
This month's issue reviewed Eric Brown's book SQL Server 2005 Distilled. Eric provides a nice high-level overview of the key features and changes in SQL Server 2005 that is a must-read for any organization that's contemplating upgrading to 2005. From the review:
Most computer trade books focus on exploring a particular subset of features in great depth and are ideal for developers interested in mastering a new technology. If, however, you want a high-level overview of a technology suitable for evaluation purposes (or for just gaining a broad understanding of the technology) you'll instead need to turn to a book like SQL Server 2005 Distilled (Addison-Wesley, 2006). Authored by former SQL Server team member Eric Brown, the book provides an executive summary of key features, such as security, database management, developer tools, business intelligence, working with XML data, CLR integration, and so on.
Apart from Chapter 6, "The Code Chapter," which has a hodgepodge of examples for performing various queries and administrative tasks, you won't find much T-SQL syntax or DBA-level walkthroughs. Instead, the other chapters provide their high-level overviews using mostly prose mixed with architectural and use case diagrams. And at 336 pages, SQL Server 2005 Distilled provides a digestible overview that can be read cover-to-cover over the course of a weekend.
As always, if you have any suggestions for products or books to review for the Toolbox column, please send them into toolsmm@microsoft.com
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