Learn MS .NET

Microsoft Press has released several E-Books that people can download and get started with, I will list them with a short synopsis so that people can go and download the books that interest them.

Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (DRAFT Preview)

This DRAFT Preview contains three chapters from what will be a ten-chapter E-book when it’s released this summer. The three chapters make up Part II, “Moving from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2010.”

You can download the DRAFT Preview of this ebook in XPS or PDF format here.

 Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (DRAFT Preview II)

Today we’re happy to release a second draft installment: the three chapters that make up Part III, “Moving from Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010.”

You can download one or both free draft ebooks (in XPS or PDF format) here.

Code for “Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010” DRAFT ebooks

A few of you requested the related code for our Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 DRAFT ebooks. (You can learn more about the ebooks and download them via this post.)

Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Our purpose in Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 is to point out both
the new and the improved in the latest version of SQL Server. Because this
version is Release 2 (R2) of SQL Server 2008, you might think the changes are
relatively minor—more than a service pack, but not enough to justify an entirely
new version.

You can download the ebook in XPS format here and in PDF format here

Programming Windows Phone 7 Series (DRAFT Preview) (by Charles Petzold)

A draft preview of his upcoming book (to be published in the fall): Programming Windows Phone 7 Series. This preview ebook contains six chapters in three parts (153 pages total).

You can download the ebook in XPS format here. Here it is in PDF format. And the zipped code samples for this draft preview are here.

These E-books have lots of good information and starting points for working with Visual Studio and the new version of Sql Server and Windows Phone 7 Series.  Hope everyone enjoys them.

During MIX09, the Web Platform Installer was mentioned in the first keynote on Wednesday, March 18. Some of the new features they mentioned were a new Web Application Gallery to install these on your server or local machine easily.

They also talked about some new extensions for IIS 7 as well.  Well they have many new features in this Beta.  I will go over them and I am testing it to see how it will do with installing some PHP applications as they are the hardest for me to get working properly on my Vista Laptop.

Web Platform Installer Download

Overview

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes it simple to download, install and keep up-to-date with the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer. In addition, install popular open source ASP.NET and PHP web apps with the Web PI.

What’s New

• Administration Pack 1.0
• Advanced Logging 1.0 Beta
• Application Request Routing 2.0 Beta
• Database Manager 1.0 – RC
• Dynamic IP Restrictions 1.0 – Beta
• FTP Publishing Service 7.5
• IIS Media Services 3.0 Beta
• Windows PowerShell Snap-In 1.0
• Silverlight 3.0 Tools for Visual Studio Beta
• SQL Server 2008 Management Studio Express
• WebDAV 7.5
• Web Deployment Tool 1.0 – RC

Lots of new goodies to play with and as well as configuring Sql Server 2008, PHP and installing several web applications and configuring them for you.

Well off to play with it and see how it goes.

For anyone having trouble trying to find an SDK that they know Microsoft ships have a look at the following it may provide and answer for you in your search.

Microsoft SDKs

While working on my projects it becomes necessary sometimes to add a column to a table in SQL Server.  My brain goes fuzzy sometimes around SQL as I don't do a lot of hardcore programming in SQL.  Most of my SQL is limited to writing basic Select, Update, Insert and Delete procedures.  So I've determined that with my blog I'm going to put up some of the tips I find along the way to make my life easier and hopefully in the long run I will make someone else's easier as well

So here is how to check if a column exists in a SQL table:

   1:  IF NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS

   2:      WHERE TABLE_NAME = ‘TableName’ AND COLUMN_NAME = ‘TableColumnName’)

   3:      BEGIN

   4:          ALTER TABLE dbo.[TableName]

   5:          ADD [TableColumnName] [int] NULL

   6:      END

   7:  GO

It's not a complicated piece of code to do just takes some remembering or looking for.