Shannon Braun's Weblog

Look's like the Acropolis CTP was released a couple of days ago...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=72386ce5-f206-4d5c-ab09-413b5f31f935&displaylang=en&tm

Looking for a sample that implements all of the latest Microsoft technologies in one package.... Including:

Windows Workflow

Windows Presentation Foundation

Windows Communication Foundation

Vista Sidebar Gadgets

Windows PowerShell

Linq

ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions

Mobile Device Development

You can find all of this in the DinnerNow.NET reference application.

The ADO.NET Data Synchronization services is now available in CTP.  This SDK will make it easier to support the disconnected operation scenarios you run into with Smart Clients.  If you are looking for more information or a good demo of the functionality you can take a look at Steve Lasker's blog and specifically his Live from Redmond Webcast.

One thing to note is that there is only a SQL Compact Edition provider and there is no SQL Express provider at this point, which means that if you are using SQL Express on the client you will need to write your own provider or wait for Microsoft to develop one.  I would suggest contacting Steve Lasker if want to see a SQL Express provider developed.  Although you could write your own, the schema creation may get a bit tricky... I know that a number of the folks that were on this team were from the SQL Server team and they were able to add some system tables to support the schema process.

They also have a synchronization blog available that discusses and demonstrates the SDK.

I stumbled across the fact that they released a new editor font for Visual Studio .NET which is supposed to be more compressed and easier to read.  I had been using Lucida Console forever and really liked that, but I like Consolas even better.

You can download it at the Microsoft Download Center.  Beware it will install as the default font for your Visual Studio environment.

I have solved this problem a number of times using recursion on the client and have always wanted to better solution for handling on the server side.  Handling it on the client requires that you bring back all of the data and recurse through it. Again I was faced with the problem this week... and I thought I would poke around to see if there was a better way to solve the problem.  It looks SQL Server 2005 now supports Common Table Expressions, which allows for recursion.  Here are a couple of articles I found explaining how to do it:

SQL Server 2005 Recursion Functions

Hierarchical Queries in SQL Server 2005