I've been using an ASP.NET application, which my colleague Alex wrote some time ago: a simple Digg clone called Shovell. I've been planning to publish the application for a while, and have finally got round to posting it up here, along with full installation and usage instructions.

To make progress as a relational Database programmer, you have to think in terms of sets, rather than lists, arrays or sequential data. Until that point, you'll feel the need to pass lists, arrays and the like to functions and procedures. Joe suggests some unusual ways around the difficulty and broods on the power of the VALUES constructor.

Arthur finds philosophy deep in a dialog box.

It's a little like having a security firm visit your house and tell you about the weaknesses that a criminal might exploit and best practices that you can adopt to make yourself less vulnerable. Alex covers clearly and explains how and why they could be problems before providing working examples of how to avoid getting caught out.

If you ever feel uneasy when you set about handcrafting database maintenance jobs for SQL Server, it may be the voice of your conscience saying 'Ola, Ola!'. Follow your conscience. Ola Hallengren has already crafted a superb set of routines to do this for you. Why reinvent something that does it all, safely and well. Brad McGehee explains....

In retrospect, it was probably the inclusion of the OUTPUT clause in the MERGE statement that gave SQL Server 2008 its most powerful SQL enhancement.. It isn't the easiest of features to explain, but Bob does it in his usual clear and careful way.

Often, there is a huge difference between software being easy to use, and easy to develop. When your pilot users tell you "by week three of any development project you've thrown out anything that takes time or just gets in your way", then it is time to be serious about usability, as well as quality. We decided to find out from some of those at the sharp end of the development of Red Gate's SQL Source Control.

One of the more important tasks in the process of rolling out incremental developments to a multi-server production system is to double-check that all of the planned modifications, and nothing else, have been deployed. An Oracle expert, Bruce Armstrong, comes across SQL Compare for Oracle, and sees if it helps with this time-consuming task.

Falcon isn't exactly new. It is a scripting language that is designed with a number of programming paradigms for multi-threaded applications. It is growing rapidly in importance. Richard Morris decided to contact Giancarlo, the language's creator, find out why there was so much interest in it.

It is an interesting time for any .NET developer wanting to develop software for mobile phones. We've always taken it for granted that there would be a good .NET platform for mobile phones. Surely Microsoft aren't going to fumble the key component, Windows Phone 7, after getting the development tools so right.