In between projects

I am in the relaxing?? period of being in between projects. The next project I will be working on is the migration of two of our SQL 2000 systems over to W2003 and SQL2005. That should be fun. Until that gets going I am brushing up on all the new technologies that are arround or soon coming out, such as LINQ, Entity Framework, VS Orcas and Longhorn (Windows Server 2008). I wonder when that's being released??

There are a few other mini projects I will be working on to get my development practises up to scratch. I work in a small IT dept and as you can proberbly guess some things we just don't do (yet). I have already implemented Source Safe 2005 and that is working out realy good. We are soon to implement a full change request/bug tracking system. I have also started using fxCop to get all code to a certain standard. The department manager is also implementing full project management using PRINCE2 techniques, so that will hopefully also improve things.

So like I said, relaxing times. Only 5 books on my current reading list:-

Sams - Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services

Apress - Beginning SQL Server 2005 for Developers From Novice to Professional

MS Press - MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit: Upgrading Your Certification to Microsoft Windows Server 2003

Syngress - Planning, Implementing and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Environment for an MCSE Certified on Windows 2000

Addison Wesley - Hitchhikers Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server

MCSE 2003 or MCTS or both

A few years back (edit:actually it was 5, where has the time gone?) I achieved my MCSE on Windows 2000. Since then I haven't realy been involved in installing and administering Windows systems (except SQL 2000 and the odd web server). I have been getting deeper and deeper in to .net. My latest position combines administration and development, so I have decided to upgrade my qualification to MCSE 2003 and then try and get down the MCTS path. I used to think that in IT you are either on the admin side of things or the development side and it is a common term to say 'a jack of all trades is master of none'. However I have found my MCSE extremely handy when developing to know the goings on in W2000, W2003 and SQL Server. As MS have announced the retirement of the upgrade exams to W2003 I am attempting this first hopefully by the end of the summer.

RegEx

Regular expressions:

Here are a link for regular expressions, they may come in handy some time.

The absolute bare minimum every programmer should know about regular expressions

LINQ Links

Just a quick post. I found these links earlier for LINQ Videos