Perhaps it’s because I keep finding new things about Windows 7 that I really like... Today’s one was that you can drag the top (or bottom) edge of a window to the edge of a screen and have that window fill the screen vertically, but keeping the left and right edges still (great for when you don’t want it maximised, or docked to the left or right). Another favourite of mine is that you can Shift+Right-click on a file and see “Copy as Path”, which is great when you want to paste the full path into

One of the Windows 7 machines in my house had a problem recently. Non-admins couldn’t log in, and there was a message saying that the System Event Notification Service wasn’t running. I could log in as admin, but couldn’t escalate to run things as Administrator. The error “The system could not find the environment option that was entered” would appear. The standard web searches weren’t my friend, but I eventually found that if I started in Safe Mode, I could run a Command Prompt as Administrator

I don’t consider myself really in the Dynamics CRM space. My area is SQL Server. Currently I’m spending most of my time in the Business Intelligence space, with plenty of stuff with relational databases as well. But that didn’t stop me from picking up a CRM book recently. Jim Steiger’s Programming Dynamics CRM 4.0 was the book in question, and I was pleasantly surprised. It seems to be very comprehensive, and well written as well. I can’t say that I tried all the examples – that would be lying, but

I feel like it’s been a while since I’ve been to Melbourne (although I did pass through the airport there on my way back from Wagga ). I don’t know when I’ll be there next, but I have felt tempted to try to get there this week. Partly it’s because my mum is about to turn sixty, but also because my friends Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal are in Australia this week, and speaking at the Melbourne SQL Server User Group tomorrow night. I won’t be there, but if you’re going to be in Melbourne, then make

I don’t know why Septembers are always busy. This one feels like it’s been interesting, and I’m not sure life will be the same again. But first, some of the biggest news – the book that I wrote a couple of chapters for is now available for purchase! A challenge was put out a while back for SQL MVPs to write a book for charity. Paul Nielsen spearheaded it, and I’m pleased to say that there was a massive response. I wrote two chapters, and this week we have had the notice

I know I won’t be there, as I’m a million miles away in Australia, but being from the UK myself, I always have an interest in the UK SQL community and in particular, events like SQL Bits. This is the fifth SQL Bits conference , and they keep getting larger and larger. I’ve heard it’s now the largest SQL-focussed event in Europe. It’s going to be in South Wales ( that’s OLD South Wales, not New South Wales ), in November. I’m sure the area is lovely, good beaches ‘n all that… but considering it’s

There are times when you want to have a Navigation property of a textbox (typically providing a link to a URL or other report), but you don’t always want the link to be there. Sometimes you just want it to be an ordinary textbox. This particularly applies when you’re using a Matrix, and you don’t want the Subtotal rows to have the navigation links. Previously I’ve blogged about using InScope to control various properties. But the thing that I hadn’t noticed was how to make the link actually disappear

…but you should still have a primary key on every table of course. It’s just that I only recently discovered that you can have a foreign key that references something else, so long as it’s known to be unique through a unique index / constraint. The scripts here demonstrate this in SQL Server 2005 and beyond. create table testunique (id int identity(1,1) primary key, otherid int); go create unique index ixOther on testunique(otherid); go create table testFK (id int identity(1,1) primary key, someid

It’s hard to think of a practical use for DENSE_RANK(), but here’s one. It’s one of the ranking functions that was introduced in SQL Server 2005, along with RANK(), NTILE(n) and the incredibly useful ROW_NUMBER(). But apart from producing reports, it’s quite hard to find genuine uses for some of them. Yesterday I answered a question at StackOverflow (first time – I often answer questions at Experts Exchange and on the MSDN Forums, but never at StackOverflow before). It’s at http://stackoverflow.com

It’s hard to think of a practical use for DENSE_RANK(), but here’s one. It’s one of the ranking functions that was introduced in SQL Server 2005, along with RANK(), NTILE(n) and the incredibly useful ROW_NUMBER(). But apart from producing reports, it’s quite hard to find genuine uses for some of them. Yesterday I answered a question at StackOverflow (first time – I often answer questions at Experts Exchange and on the MSDN Forums, but never at StackOverflow before). It’s at http://stackoverflow.com