A few issues have cropped up this week while working on the new book (still in progress):
- Why doesn’t the Visual Studio 2005 Query Designer know how to deal with the O’Malley issue when entering values for the query Filter criteria or New Values in Insert and Update query types? This problem has been around for a long time and should have been addressed ages ago. Here’s a quote from my new book (still in progress)
Unfortunately, someone at Microsoft was asleep when they wrote the Insert Values or Update query type. When the developer fills in the “criteria” pane with New Column values, the routine that captures these values doesn’t know how to deal with the “O’Malley” issue. For instance, if you enter the name “George O’Malley” as a New Value, the Query Designer strips the interior single quote instead of doubling it up (as it should). This means that if you don’t catch it, Visual Studio creates an INSERT statement and sets the Author name to “George OMalley”. Thankfully, George is used to this abuse—but his wife is not, so you had best fix it before she finds out. When working with the Query Designer and Input Values or Update query types (and you have imbedded special characters in a string literal) you’ll need to “double” up the special characters to get them to work correctly. So to fix George, we need to enter his name as “George O’’Malley”—and don’t forget about his wife.
I go on to say that this is handled correctly elsewhere and in ADO.NET when you use Command objects with Parameters.
- And another thing: Visual Studio 2005’s Server Explorer now permits you to create new queries (from the Table and View icons in the Server Explorer). However for some reason there is no way to save the queries you’re working on.
- There also does not seem to be a way to execute maintenance queries from VS without getting several annoying “ya know... we can't create a graphical representation of that SQL“ messages.
- We also lost the ability to set the Visual Studio 2005 font size from the command line. This was very handy for high-resolution screens and for presentation work.
I hear that the Visual Studio team is off working on a whole new suite of features. I just wish they would focus on fixing what they have before reinventing it again.
I'm not sure (might be only in beta version) but I was not able to create a Rule in the management studio (right click > new rule...). I had to create a new query and use the dml statement "CREATE RULE ..." in order to do that...
I have never been an early adopter of brand new Microsoft Products. Most developers I know including myself wait atleast untill the fist service pack comes out to iron out the killer bugs. Definately want to get my hands on all of it though.
Rules have been "deprecated" in SQL Server. In their infinite wisdom, the SQL Server people seem to think that Constraints will work as well. While I don't agree, I think we're stuck with the reality of creating rules on our own in TSQL.
As far as being an "early adopter", if you have that attitude, you'll never keep your job skills sharp enough to compete with the offshore developers (who have been studying the new stuff since the first alphas).