Taken from the download site:

SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now available. You can use these packages to upgrade any SQL Server 2008 edition.
Note:We remain committed to our plans to keep service packs contained, focusing on essential updates only, primarily a Roll-up of Cumulative Update 1 to 3, Quick Fix Engineering (QFE) updates, as well as fixes to issues reported through the SQL Server community. While keeping product changes contained, we have made significant investments to ease deployment and management of Service Packs:

• Slipstream – You are now able to integrate the base installation with service packs (or Hotfixes) and install in a single step.
• Service Pack Uninstall – You are now able to uninstall only the Service Pack (without removing the whole instance)
• Report Builder 2.0 Click Once capability

Download it here.

Grz, Kris.

Wow, it seems I’ve been busy lately. First becoming an ASP Insider, then got my MVP renewed and today I breached as the first person ever the mythical barrier of 100.000 recognition points on the ASP.NET forums.

Grz, Kris.

Got the mail today with the great news that I’m renewed as an MVP for the year 2009. I must say, a week after hearing that I became an ASP Insider this is also very good news. I also got the news that my colleague Marc Gregoire, one of the 3 colleagues I went to the MVP summit with, also got renewed. So also my congratulations go to him.

Grz, Kris.

I got the message from Microsoft that I’ve been added to the ASP Insiders crew. This is a great reward from Microsoft towards certain people. Like Scott Guthrie described it:

The ASPInsiders team spends countless hours answering questions and giving guidance to other ASP.NET developers, as well as providing feedback and direction on new features for future ASP.NET releases. Their work and contributions are invaluable.

I’m very excited and honored by having this reward as it shows the recognition from Microsoft towards my continuous support towards members on the ASP.NET forums. The benefit for members are that I’m in more direct contact with the ASP.NET team itself being able to provide feedback and make suggestions about things I noticed either as a question on the forums or from personal experience. This can result in having Microsoft to create even better products for their customers.

Grz, Kris.

Just found on twitter about the release of the ASP.NET MVC Training kit.

Grz, Kris.

What can you do to compete with something that’s already established for years like Adobe Flash? Deliver something decent yourself but most importantly have content for it. Good content that can interest people. Microsoft created during the past years some great technology that can compete with Flash: Silverlight. Used during the last Olympics gave it already a great boost but that was last year. Continuous delivering good content is important to reach new people. Here comes marketing into play. Well it seems there’s some good content for Silverlight and Deepzoom:

• World telescope. A great way to discover the universe around us.
• Playboy cover to cover. Apparently the old numbers are scanned in and viewable. Guess a lot of people will have a lot of reading to do. From what I heard there are some pretty good articles in it.

Grz, Kris.

I was browsing on the new pages for ASP.NET MVC on www.asp.net and noticed that besides Storefront and Nerddinner there was another tutorial guide available: Contact manager by Stephen Walther. It has currently already 7 tutorials:

• Iteration #1 - Create the application
• Iteration #2 - Make the application look nice
• Iteration #3 - Add form validation
• Iteration #4 - Make the application loosely coupled
• Iteration #5 - Create unit tests
• Iteration #6 - Use test driven development
• Iteration #7 - Add Ajax functionality

Some more reading for me the next days…

Grz, Kris.

In case you didn’t know it yet, Microsoft released version 8 of their browser. It ships now with some handy built in developer tools. I found out about this little overview: Discovering Internet Explorer Developer Tools.

Grz, Kris.

Grab it here: www.microsoft.com/ie8. Better security included, faster rendering on pages and more standards based.

I only hope that gmail and facebook update their CSS quite rapidly as they don’t render too well at the moment.

Grz, Kris.

Noticed it a couple of hours ago on the forums that someone was able to download the bits and just noticed that the download link itself was available: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53289097-73ce-43bf-b6a6-35e00103cb4b&displaylang=en.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 provides a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework on top of the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime. This means that developers can take advantage of the MVC design patterns to create their Web Applications which includes the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns (the UI or view from the business and application logic and backend data), as well as facilitate test driven development (TDD). The ASP.NET MVC framework defines a specific pattern to the Web Application folder structure and provides a controller base-class to handle and process requests for “actions”. Developers can take advantage of the specific Visual Studio 2008 MVC templates within this release to create their Web applications, which includes the ability to select a specific Unit Test structure to accompany their Web Application development.
The MVC framework is fully extensible at all points, allowing developers to create sophisticated structures that meet their needs, including for example Dependency Injection (DI) techniques, new view rendering engines or specialized controllers.
As the ASP.NET MVC framework is built on ASP.NET 3.5, developers can take advantage of many existing ASP.NET 3.5 features, such as localization, authorization, Profile etc.n

Time to read the free eBook from Scottgu: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/03/10/free-asp-net-mvc-ebook-tutorial.aspx.

Grz, Kris.