The Ashdar Partners Blog

A bit of a plug for the local user groups: The next Philly Code Camp  will be held on October 11, 2008 at DeVry in Fort Washington.  I don't make it to the regular Philly SQL Server User Group meetings anymore because I'm working downtown and the drive to Malvern is painful, but I do try to make it to the Code Camps. I always learn something. I tend to bounce from track to track, depending on my interest level in a particular topic and how crowded the room is, but I'm always in line for lunch. ;-)

I haven't had much going on lately, at least not anything of interest to anyone out there. It's been a long time between posts, but here are some new posts, albeit less technical than my earlier postings.

One way or another, I've been fighting the lack of integration between "backend" and middle-tier (or client-tier) development environments for decades now.  About a year ago, I was fairly thrilled with the introduction of the "Database Edition" of Visual Studio, A/K/A "Data Dude". I was immediately disappointed by the restrictive licensing and the cost. I've been using Data Dude tools for nearly a year. I think that they can be an abolute boon for developers of new applications or ones that are in "maintenance mode". Unfortunately, any discussion of Data Dude always involves it's cost.   It often seems like the cost of everything in the computing universe drops except for bandwidth and Microsoft products. It wasn't always this way.   Some of my earliest professional IT work involved writing programs with QuickBasic 3.0 (and, later, with Microsoft BASIC using the "Professional Development System" A/K/A "PDS Version 7...