Lately, I have been trying to up my game a bit and one of the things I am doing is using some of the latest tools and bits of things.
(Partly, this is because I have been working with some old technology lately and I am feeling "dated". Ask me about Fox Pro, if you dare.)
PowerShell
After many years of not seeing value in updating, I am moving to PowerShell 6. (Version 6.2, specifically.) Frankly, more things work than I expected. I haven't seen any performance regressions and things have gone smoothly. I think I spent more time incorporating the PowerShell version into my Prompt function than anything else that I had to do because of the upgrade.
SSMS
I am running the absolutely-latest build of SSMS. I skipped some SSMS builds when the removed the diagramming functionality. Now that it has been put back into the product, I am on the update train again.
Aside: The diagramming feature isn't awesome but it is easy to use, requires no installation, doesn't cost anything and is more than adequate for 95% of the things I need such a tool for. I know that it isn't a real "enterprisey" ERD tool, but I don't need one. In fact, if they took out all of the "modify the tables in the database" features, I would like it more. The main thing is that, sometimes, you just want to look at a diagram of a subset of the tables in a database.
Windows 10 1903 Update
After not getting any update action for weeks after it was released, I bit the bullet and forced this latest Windows release onto my main laptop. (Carpe Diem, right?) It's been fine so far. The blurred-out login display was a little jarring at first. Multi-monitor has always been the shakiest feature of my laptop, but it has not been any worse after updating.
DbaTools
After several years of "beta", DbaTools has had it's first release that is judged as production-ready. I've updated and I'm slowly looking through my code for issues. I've been using this as a production tool for years. I'm excited for this release because it validates all of the work that has been done on the tool and the names of functions should stop jumping around so much.
Learnings
I spent a lot of time watching things on YouTube (or the SQL PASS site) in order to learn new things and see how other people approach the problems that I probably have. Lately, I have been focusing on the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2019 videos.
Just For Fun
I am trying out the new "Windows Terminal", which is in preview and available in the Windows Store. I found this through a post on Hanselman's site. It found my Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and gave me bash, it found my new and old PowerShell installations and my old, trusty cmd shell (which I still sometimes use for chocolatey). I haven't put it into heavy use yet, but nearly everything seems OK so far. (The settings menu pick doesn't seem to be working properly for me.)
No comments:
Post a Comment