It’s been entirely too long since my last post. The last time I posted I had just started my new job and was blogging about the experience and silly setup reminders for myself. It’s been about 9 months and I am still loving Expedia! I have a great management team supporting me. And they like to have fun; the company held an off-site in Las Vegas, at the Palazzo for three days.

Tonight, at my local .NET User’s Group meeting, I was lucky enough to win a 1-year subscription to PluralSight On-Demand! The subscription was one of the give-aways that the group was doing. I am really fortunate to have won it, too. With my new job that focuses on Database side of development, I’ve been getting a little rusty at my coding skillset. The standard subscription lets me have full access to over 70 .

Whenever I get a clean install of Visual Studio, I can never find the menu for displaying the Immediate Window for debugging code. The keyboard shortcut for it is: Ctl + Alt + I This post is probably more for my own reference later, but maybe it will satisfy someone’s search.

I started a new job this week. I am working for Expedia, Inc now as a Database Development Engineer (or DB Dev, for short). So far, I am really enjoying the opportunity. The people are really great and have a real entusiasm for what they do. It’s a quicker pace for development releases than I’m used to, but it seems like they have a really good system of checks and balances to ensure the process is flawless.

I love taking on new projects, and I’m a do-it-yourself kind of person. If there is something that needs to be done around the house, I don’t hire it out, I do it myself. It’s not just physical stuff, either. That DIY mentality applies to everything in my life … doing taxes, starting businesses, writing websites/software, & designing logos. I really try to tackle all of these things myself. However, as of lately, I’ve been feeling stretched really thin; too thin, actually.

This morning, when I came into work, I discovered that Windows Update had graciously restarted my machine for me. No big deal. But wait, then I realized I had some SQL work that I hadn’t saved yet. NOOOOOO!!! I know, I know, …​ always save your work. But yesterday, I didn’t. So you can imagine how irritated I was to discover that all of that hard work was gone. Or so I thought.

Simple-Talk Publishing has released a new free eBook: Defensive Database Programming with SQL Server, by Alex Kuznetsov. The goal of Defensive Programming is to produce resilient code that responds gracefully to the unexpected. To the SQL Server programmer, this means T-SQL code that behaves consistently and predictably in cases of unexpected usage, doesn’t break under concurrent loads, and survives predictable changes to database schemas and settings. Too often as developers, we stop work as soon as our code passes a few basic tests to confirm that it produces the 'right result' in a given use case.

Today, I passed my first Microsoft Certification exam, MCTS exam 70-433! With this certification, I am a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist for SQL Server 2008 Database Development. Getting a MS cert has always been something that I always wanted to achieve, but I never thought I would have the time to study. Well I signed up back in April and just knew that if I didn’t just do it, I probably never would.

I’m a pretty big fan of RedGate. I use a few of their products almost religiously. Their SQL Compare product is probably the most used tool in my toolbox. I follow their blogs & evangelists, regularly consume their free eBooks, and generally admire the company as a whole. Their “Ingeniously Simple” mantra is really what keeps me coming back. I even started to apply for a job there once. However, the small requirement to live in England killed it for me.

Microsoft Press has released a free ebook: Introducing Microsoft SQL Server R2, by Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner. There are 10 chapters and 216 pages. Here is a quick overview of the chapters: Chapter 1: SQL Server 2008 R2 Editions and Enhancements Chapter 2: Multi-Server Administration Chapter 3: Data-Tier Applications Chapter 4: High Availability and Virtualization Enhancements Chapter 5: Consolidation and Monitoring Chapter 6: Scalable Data Warehousing Chapter 7: Master Data Services Chapter 8: Complex Event Processing with StreamInsight Chapter 9: Reporting Services Enhancements Chapter 10: Self-Service Analysis with PowerPivot