What a great way to bring in the new year with a tool that is going to increase my productivity many times over.  MS just introduced the Database Publishing Wizard, which eases the deployment of SQL Server (multiple versions).  This has always been a challenge and every time I need to deploy a new database or schema changes, I've thought that this should be much easier.  Now, it will be.

 

The Database Publishing Wizard has both a script generation option and the ability to publish directly to a destination database, whether it be local or across a network.  Check out Scott Guthrie's first blog post, "Recipe: Deploying a SQL Database to a Remote Hosting Environment (Part 1)".  When putting together a list of "Must Have" tools, this will definitely be high on my list.

Charlie Calvert has a series of LINQ tutorials at The LINQ Factory.

Ted Neward wrote a nice article on MSDN titled "Pragmatic Architecture: Layering".  It gets me thinking about how many times I've interchanged the terms Layer and Tier myself when discussing how to build an application.  Most of the time, I'm really talking about N-Layered architecture for the purpose of making an application more maintainable and reusable.  Sometimes, I think that the terminology is just splitting hairs, but as Ted infers, a bad implementation based on unnecessary [physical] tiers can really hurt a system.  I'm still a strong advocate of the logical layer design approach because, IMO, the alternative leaves too many options for building bad software.

This is a little bit old, but I was doing some catching up on my reading and found this Forbes article, Toppling Linux, that is pretty interesting.  According to this article, Richard Stallman, is "is waging a new crusade that could end up toppling the revolution he helped create".  I've never been totally comfortable with the GNU license and this makes me even more cautious about open-source software in general.