We don't have a release date, the final feature set has yet to be released, but slowly I can see the train building steam. This week I found a number of blogs starting to look at various aspects of SQL Server 2008. If you look through the newsletter, you'll see coverage of data compression, clustering changes, and lock escalation changes.

Unlike the very long journey to Yukon, I can see that this train will pick up steam quickly and arrive sometime next summer. My best guess is still late May, probably a TechEd release, which would be slightly outside their Q2 window, but that's a good place to drop the final RTM bits.

Open Source

Not as in beer, but as in look and see. Microsoft is releasing the 3.5 .NET Framework code, allowing you to pop it into Visual Studio and step through the framework along with your code to find out why things are or aren't working.

I've heard all kinds of speculation on what this means and lots of complaints that this isn't "open source" in the traditional sense in that it would allow end-users to change the code. Instead if you find issues, you're encouraged to report them via the Product Feedback center at Microsoft. While that seems to prevent forks and keeps things under Microsoft's control, it's also a good thing. If people are downloading the .NET library from Microsoft then wouldn't you want to ensure there's just one version of 3.5.1? I certainly wouldn't want to have multiple 3.5 versions from different sources to worry about at clients.

And especially in the .NET assemblies on my SQL Servers. One version, one set of expectations about how it will work.

Over the last few days, I've learned a few things. Did you know you could get the code to MFC and other libraries from Microsoft? That's what Joel says, and is surprised it took so long for them to release it. I did not know that, but I've never been that deep a programmer who wanted to dig into things that far.

I do think this will result in making .NET developers happy (developers always like source code) and it should help some of them write better code by being able to step through the .NET libraries. There're just two things I'm wondering about:

1. How much productivity will be wasted going through code just to do it?
2. Will Microsoft admit that "many eyes" on their source code will result in better code?

A Second Chance

Awhile back Microsoft offered exam insurance and I tried it out. Not because I needed it, but just so I could report on it for you folks. I paid $175 for an exam with insurance, which was a $45 increase over the regular price of exams. If I had failed the exam, I'd get a second chance to pass it for free, or save myself $75. If I passed, I'd get 25% off the next exam, so a $13.75 penlty. There were restrictions, only with VUE test centers, not Prometric and it was a little bit of a hassle. However I took advantage of a promoition to get a free year of TechNet, so it was a $200+ savings to me 🙂

However they ended the program, perhaps because it wasn't well received or it was too much of a hassle to administer it or it didn't work out. I know that the test center I used, which does Prometric and Vue, much prefers Prometric process.

Now they're offering Second Shot, designed to let you have a second chance at an exam if you fail it. No limit on the free offer, so you get a second chance for every exam you schedule and pay for until Jan 30, 2008. This time it's a Prometric offer and I can only speculate that Prometric is trying to drive some testing and certification revenue. Perhaps too many of you aren't upgrading your certs?

The value of certification is what you make of it. You can put a positive spin on it with some experience and there's no downside to proving you know something with the exam. What you know might be debatable, but you've proven you're interested in your career at the least and you can learn and memorize things.

Human Error

Someone at the US federal government turned off the ca.gov domain. Apparently a sub-domain for one department had some of its servers hacked and were redirecting people to some pornographic site. We don't really know who or why the change was made to the domain, but it was quickly undone before a huge amount of government business got backed up.

My guess is someone over-reacted at the General Services Administration, but it does bring to light the problems with an infrastructure that got co-opted early on by colleges and universities and expanded in an environment of trust.

I'm not sure you can trust too many organizations these days and we need to be more security conscious as we move forward. However we also need to react and not over-react.

Steve Jones

The PodCasts

The podcasting continues with hopefully a few improvements. I'm trying a couple new techniques to try and clean up the audio and make the video more interesting. Sorry, no video today. I had some tight deadlines for this update and the editing takes longer than expected.

As always, feedback is appreciated.

• Audio PodCast (MP3, 5.7MB)

Music for today's podcast from Josh Woodward. Check him out and support him by buying some music if you like it.

And if you're in a band or produce music, send me a sample and I'll see about featuring it for one of the podcasts.