" Robert Myers has more than 25 years of professional experience on software development teams, having consulted for leading companies in aerospace, government, medical, software, and financial sectors. He has trained and coached teams in XP and Scrum since 1999. Rob now continues these activities as Agile Coach at Salesforce.com. He blogs occasionally at PowersOfTwo.agileinstitute.com. "

"UPDATE: I've updated the msysgit installation screens so they are more current. Git-1.7.2.3 is the latest one as of this update. The subsequent screens show Git-1.6.3. I assure you that all of the commands in the first three parts of this series will work on 1.6.3."

"As part of my talk at the 2009 US PASS Summit here in Seattle called Inside SQL Server Wait Types, I'm creating this blog post as a reference point that can be used to find out information about wait types in SQL Server 2005 and 2008. My hope is that if you have a question about a wait type you encounter with SQL Server 2005, 2008, or beyond, you will use this blog post as the starting point. This blog post should also be used as an enhancement to what you can find at the following SQL Server Books Online topic:"

"To say I like SP_WhoIsActive is an understatement. This is probably the most useful and effective stored procedure I've ever encountered for activity monitoring. The purpose of the SP_WhoIsActive stored procedure is to give DBAs and developers as much performance and workload data about SQL Server's internal workings as possible, while retaining both flexibility and security. It was written by Boston-area consultant and writer Adam Machanic, who is also a long-time SQL Server MVP, a founder of SQLBlog.com, and one of the most elite individuals who are qualified to teach the Microsoft Certified Master classes."

"There can be a great difference in the performance of a particular routine in a test database, and in a fully loaded production system. When you hit performance problems in a database under load, and there is excessive locking and blocking, how can you determine exactly where the problems lie, in order to fix them? Read on..."

"Lock escalation is a event which occurs when SQL Server decides to upgrade a lock at a lower level hierarchy to a lock to a table level lock., In other words, when a particular query obtains a large number of row level locks/ page level locks, SQL Server decides that instead of creating and granting number of row level/page level locks, it is effective to grant a single table level lock. Or to be precise,"

"Recently I encountered a case when I knew much more about the data than the optimizer. Originally the performance was horrible, this is why I had to have a look at the query in the first place. When I was able to share my knowledge with the optimizer, it produced a better plan, and the query ran dramatically faster."

"Microsoft SQL Server performs dynamic memory management based on the memory requirements of the current load and activities on the system. On a Windows Server 2003 or a Windows XP or later version system, SQL Server can use the memory notification mechanisms that are provided by the QueryMemoryResourceNotification Windows API. On a Microsoft Windows 2000 Server-based system, SQL Server periodically calculates the free physical memory on the system by using the native Windows API. Based on this information from the QueryMemoryResourceNotification Windows API or from the memory calculation, SQL Server responds to the current memory situation on a specific system. This provides the following benefits:"

" Fred George discusses Programmer Anarchy, a development process where programmers are not just empowered to act but the driving force behind a product, leading to substantial increase in results. "

Cross device mobile SDK based on standards and web technologies

"Column-Based Query Accelerator will help dramatically increase query performance ~10x and reduce performance tuning through interactive experiences with data for near instant response times and streamlined setup which removes the need to build summary aggregates."

"Lurking on any machine that has Windows Scripting Host installed (virtually all machines these days, although scripting can be disabled), is a powerful Regular Expressions facility, the VBScript.RegExp scripting object. You can get to it from any COM client that supports the IDispatch interface. IDispatch, you'll recall, is COM's popular late-binding interface - it allows applications to use COM components without knowing anything about them at compile-time. In T-SQL, we get to IDispatch via the sp_OA stored procedures. Via a simple UDF, we can access the RegExp object as though it were part of T-SQL:"

"The authors of the agile manifesto asked us ten years ago to rethink the way we (programmers) collaborated with our customers. I, along with my PhD advisors, Robert Biddle and James Noble, were intrigued, hopeful, and also simply keen to understand how it all worked in practice. Not how people think it should have worked, as is so often reported, but how it really worked. We spent the next six years understanding this, and over that time, visited eleven agile teams[1] in five different countries. We visited teams across a variety of industries, with the teams ranging in size from 5 to 60 people."

"In an earlier blog post, Creating or modifying Entity Framework EDMX files from code: an introduction to HuagatiEDMXTools.dll, I wrote about the EDMX file wrapper that is used by the Huagati DBML/EDMX Tools add-in for parsing, updating, creating, and writing EDMX files. HuagatiEDMXTools adds an easy to use object model on top of EDMX files (see documentation at http://huagati.com/edmxtools/help ), making it a lot easier to create/read/update EDMX files, and to write LINQ queries against Entity Framework 4 metadata. It also has a number of built-in queries and lookup functions that make it a breeze to work with Entity Framework 4 EDMX files from code."

"Hopefully if you're reading this you've noticed that I've started a series of Tips recently. The tips will mostly apply to Entity Framework or Data Services. Seeing as I expect to have a lots of tips, it probably makes sense to have some sort of index. That is what this is post is, as I add a new tip I will add it to this page too. If you have any suggested topics for tips please let me know by leaving a comment or emailing me directly at Microsoft (Alexj is my alias at Microsoft, and emails at Microsoft are in the form alias@microsoft.com) Without further ado here are what I have so far:"

"Assuming a WorkItem has many WorkItemNotes..."

"At first glance you're going to hate the "advanced layout" that is currently a W3C working draft. Maybe it's the similarity to table-based layouts, of which we all still have nightmares. Mainly, you'll likely cringe just because it's such a foreign way to write CSS. I think you'll eventually come around."

"Many experienced database professionals have acquired a somewhat jaded view of parallel query execution. Sometimes, this is a consequence of bad experiences with older versions of SQL Server. Just as frequently, however, this view is the result of misconceptions, or an otherwise incomplete mastery of the techniques required to effectively design and tune queries for parallel execution."

"The CTP includes some work called the Productivity Improvements for EF which aims to provide a simpler and more productive experience writing data access code with EF. Along with a bunch of conventions that take care of a lot of common tasks the Productivity Improvements also include some more subtle improvements over the core EF API. One of these is the introduction of an Include method that uses a lambda rather than strings to specify the include path."

"This topic describes patterns that you can use to load related entities. Entity types can define navigation properties that represent associations in the data model. You can use these properties to load entities that are related to the returned entity by the defined association. When entities are generated based on the data model, navigation properties are generated for entities at both ends of an association. These navigation properties return either a reference on the "one" end of a one-to-one or many-to-one relationship or a collection on the "many" end of a one-to-many or many-to-many relationship. For more information, see Navigation Properties and Defining and Managing Relationships. "