Author Archives: Lenni Lobel

WCF Data Services vs. WCF RIA Services – Making the Right Choice

By Lenni Lobel | February 19, 2012

In .NET, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides all the support you need to build distributed service-oriented data access solutions. You can certainly work with WCF directly to create custom services and expose data from an Entity Data Model (EDM) with the ADO.NET Entity Framework, or from any other data access layer (DAL) of your choosing. [...]

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How Significant is the SQL Server 2012 Release?

By Lenni Lobel | February 5, 2012

SQL Server, particularly its relational database engine, matured quite some time ago. So the “significance” of every new release over recent years can be viewed—in some ways—as relatively nominal. The last watershed release of the product was actually SQL Server 2005, which was when the relational engine (that, for years, defined SQL Server) stopped occupying [...]

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Creating a Helpful Extension Method for Visibility in XAML

By Lenni Lobel | January 21, 2012

In this post, I’ll show you how to create an extension method for the bool class that will simplify your .NET code in XAML-based apps (either WPF or Silverlight). In particular, this extension method addresses the fact that the Visibility property of UI controls in XAML is not a Boolean (true/false) value (as has traditionally [...]

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It’s a File System… It’s a Database Table… It’s SQL Server Denali FileTable!

By Lenni Lobel | January 1, 2012

SQL Server 2008 introduced FILESTREAM, an innovative feature that integrates the relational database engine with the NTFS file system to provide highly efficient storage and management of BLOBs. Now FileTable, a new feature coming in the next version of SQL Server (code-named “Denali”), builds on FILESTREAM and takes database BLOB management to the next level. [...]

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SQL Server 2012 Windowing Functions Part 2 of 2: New Analytic Functions

By Lenni Lobel | December 19, 2011

This is the second part of my two-part article on windowing functions in SQL Server 2012. In Part 1, I explained the new running and sliding aggregation capabilities added to the OVER clause in SQL Server 2012. In this post, I’ll explain the new T-SQL analytic windowing functions. All of these functions operate using the [...]

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SQL Server 2012 Windowing Functions Part 1 of 2: Running and Sliding Aggregates

By Lenni Lobel | December 8, 2011

The first windowing capabilities appeared in SQL Server 2005 with the introduction of the OVER clause and a set of ranking functions (ROW_NUMBER, RANK, DENSE_RANK, and NTILE). The term “window,” as it is used here, refers to the scope of visibility from one row in a result set relative to neighboring rows in the same [...]

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Book Announcement! Introducing “Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2012″

By Lenni Lobel | November 21, 2011

I’m very happy to announce that I am authoring Tallan’s new book on SQL Server 2012! The full title, “Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2012” will technically be published by O’Reilly, yet it will be branded as a Microsoft Press book, and will feature Tallan’s logo on the front cover. O’Reilly recently acquired MS Press, but [...]

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Using SqlFileStream with C# to Access SQL Server FILESTREAM Data

By Lenni Lobel | August 22, 2011

FILESTREAM is a powerful feature in SQL Server that stores varbinary(max) column data (BLOBs) in the file system (where BLOBs belongs) rather than in the database’s structured file groups (where BLOBs kill performance). This feature was first introduced in SQL Server 2008, and is now being expanded with the new FileTable feature coming in SQL [...]

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Introducing SQL Server Developer Tools (code-named “Juneau”)

By Lenni Lobel | August 1, 2011

With SQL Server Denali CTP3 released just two weeks ago, I’ve been ramping up fast as I write the new edition of Tallan’s SQL Server book (Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2012, O’Reilly) and prepare for upcoming presentations at the NJSQL User Group (Sep 20) and the SDC event in the Netherlands (Oct 2/3). I recently [...]

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