The Great 2006 Software Review

2006 was a great year for software. I thought I would make my first post of the new year as a review of the software that was released last year that caught my interest. This is software that I think will have an impact on the world (some big, some small). It is not necessarily software that I use on a regular basis (or at all :).

I know I'm going to miss some great software, so please feel free to post anything I might have missed.

NOTE: Most of the links go to the original announcements. Some are official press releases, others are just blog entries.

Google Bookmarks (via the toolbar) - January 30th

Everybody that uses a browser knows what bookmarks are (also known as favorites). The Google difference is that these bookmarks are stored online, but are accessible through the Google toolbar in the browser.

I love being able to share my bookmarks between home and work and that I don't have to remember to back them up before I get a new computer.

Google Calendar - April 13th

My wife and I now share a calendar. This is a very convenient way to communicate events between us. There is also a very handy Google calendar gadget for the Google Sidebar that shows me the calendar right on my desktop at work so I always know what's coming up.

Windows Live Writer (beta) - August 11th

I'm using this software write now to create this post. It is a very nice blog entry tool. There are still a few kinks to work out, but overall it's great! It was very easy to set it up to upload my posts to my blog.

Firebird 2.0 RC3 - August 13th

This is a great database. It's reliable, performs well, easy to use, and it's free with no limitations. I've been using the previous version of the DB for close to a year and have been very impressed with it.

Of course most people need more than a command-line utility to create and manage a database (not to mention testing it). IBExpert is a great commercial product with a free version for individual developers (it's limited, but you can still do a lot of stuff with it). If you've used SQL Server Enterprise Manager you can probably imagine what features it has (I actually believe that IBExpert has more features than SQL Server Enterprise Manager).

Logitech MX Revolution Mouse - August 24th

Ok, this isn't software, but I'm still damn excited about it! Mostly it's the flywheel for scrolling. It actually switches between a flywheel and ratchet (standard scroll wheel behavior) depending on the application you are using.

PowerShell RC 2 - September 26th

Command-line + .Net, what's not to like :). If they can fix the performance issues, I'm sure that many Windows admins are going to be very happy people.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets - October 11th

The future of the office software suite is here! Google has created an Internet based document editor (like Word) and spreadsheet application (like Excel). They allow for a high degree of collaboration, including the ability to work on the same document at the same time and receive live updates, almost like an instant messenger program (as rumor has it anyway, I haven't had the opportunity to see that work).

Internet Explorer 7 - October 18th

It's about time Microsoft updated its browser! They have done a great job of cleaning up the UI and providing the features that experienced web surfers have come to expect (such as tabbed browsing).

Firefox 2 - October 25th

I am very impressed with the improvements that have been made in such a short amount of time by an open-source project. It's great to see a viable alternative to Internet Explorer (if for no other reason than to encourage Microsoft to keep its browser up to date).

Microsoft Windows Desktop Search 3.0 - October 25th

This is the most effective way to search your Outlook email that I'm aware of. It also searches other documents (including MS Office) on your system as well. It's easy to use, fast, and produces good results.

.Net 3 (including WPF and WCF) - November 6th

These technologies will definitely have an impact on the world, especially Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), though it may take a few years for the hardware to catch up. Expect to see some amazing consumer applications coming out soon.

Basically the WPF (not to be confused with WTF) allows designers to create graphically intense (including animations) user interfaces quickly and easily. .Net 3 comes installed on Windows Vista and can also be installed on Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server.

Windows Vista - November 8th

Microsoft's new OS is possibly one of the best yet (based on the presentations I've had of it anyway). It has some great features for security and usability. As I look into my crystal ball, I see a new computer with Windows Vista on it in my future :).

I really looking forward to Windows Home Server. Home Server is essentially an appliance that you can hook up to your network for file sharing and other nifty things (it's a full version of Windows Vista). Unfortunately it's not due out until the second half of 2007. If you're interested in this, here's a great Ch 9 Video.

SQL Prompt 3 (beta) - ~December 11th

It's about time somebody added Intellisense to my SQL scripts. This has made writing SQL much less painful. I know longer need to scan the object browser every time I need to find a table or field.

Google Patent Search - December 14th

Patent surfing just might be the next big time-waster (ok, probably not). Google has certainly made looking for patents much, much simpler. You can now search for patents from the comfort of your home using Google's excellent search capabilities in order to make sure that your new "great idea" is not already patented.

Again, if you know of something I missed, please post it.

The beta for SQL Prompt 3 is now available

I just installed the beta for SQL Prompt 3 today. For those that don't know what SQL Prompt is, it is basically Intellisense for Query Analyzer. They are currently giving away v2, but they are planning on selling v3 (get v2 while it lasts). If you like Intellisense in Visual Studio and you also write T-SQL, you'll probably appreciate the productivity improvements with SQL Prompt.

They've made some great improvements to the Intellisense dropdown. It is, of course, context sensitive, but it is also organized in categories. It allows you to view just a certain set of candidates (such as columns or functions). It's vaguely reminiscent of Visual Assist X (VA). It would be nice if they made it work more like VA. One of the things I like most about VA is that I can type any part of a method/property/etc and it will list it in the dropdown. If you have a couple of hundred choices, being able to type "order" and getting all of the candidates that include "order" somewhere in the name is very handy!

Another feature that I really like about the new SQL Prompt 3 is the auto-expand. If you type out a stored procedure name, SQL Prompt 3 can automatically expand the statement to include the parameters as well. You can also expand a * to the complete list of columns simply by hitting TAB when the caret is next to the *.

SQL Prompt 3 offers many configurable options to allow you to setup your environment the way you like it. It also includes the ability to add snippets that can be automatically expanded for common or complex SQL statements.

I'm glad they decided to limit the number of products they support. I use Query Analyzer exclusively for writing SQL (I tried using Visual Studio, but could never get used to it). I would much prefer a product that works very well for one or two products than one that almost works ok for a half dozen very different products. One thing I often wonder is why they didn't just create their own IDE for SQL scripts. It seems like it would integrate well with their other products (which I haven't used, but they look intriguing). It would be nice to have a SQL IDE that integrated with VSS. Perhaps they could have even integrated it with Visual Studio (or at least be able to open up Visual Studio projects to get to the SQL scripts embedded in them).

A word of warning, the Automatic Closing Characters feature doesn't work very well. In fact, I had to turn it off. Often times I would type a single tick and it wouldn't add the second tick. However, when I added the second one, it would add a third! Fairly annoying. Even when it did work correctly, it still suffers the same annoying problem as most tools that implement this which is if you type the closing character yourself, you end up having to remove the extras. VA handles this much better. It seems to remember when it automatically adds a closing char and will remove it if you type it yourself (VA is the first tool that I have not turned this feature off).

Another issue that I've seen with SQL Prompt 3 are that the columns in the dropdown cannot be resized. This means I usually only see the first part of the column name and rarely see the column type. I can expand the whole dropdown, but all of the columns expand with it. This means the dropdown has to be absurdly wide in order to show the entire column name (good thing I have a widescreen monitor :).

If red-gate is reading this, a couple of features that I would like to see in the release (at least the next version), are...

• Expand UPDATE and INSERT statements. It would really save me a lot of time if I was able to type "UPDATE MyTable[TAB]" and have the columns laid out for me similar to the auto-expand feature for stored procedures. It's much easier to delete the ones I don't want (even if it's most of them) than to add the ones I do want.
• Being able to view a list of references in a script. For instance, view all the lines that use the Employee table or the FirstName column from the Employee table, or the @DoSomething variable.
• Provide some SQL refactoring capabilities. Changing the name of a variable is the only one that comes to mind, but I'm sure if I spent some time on this I would find some other useful refactorings in a SQL script.
• Spell check. Who can't use a good spell check program to check their comments :). This is something I didn't realize I needed in an IDE until I installed VA.

If you develop T-SQL scripts, SQL Prompt 3 will greatly improve your productivity. This is a must-have tool for all T-SQL developers.

Here's the link to the announcement on red-gates website...

http://www.red-gate.com/messageboard/viewtopic.php?t=3811

This post turned out much longer than I planned :). I hope you have found the information useful.

SQL Intellisense, Intellisense for SQL Server - SQL Prompt

This seems to be a very cool tool I've just discovered. It runs in the tray and turns Query Analyzer (I'm not sure about other editors) into a full featured editor! It includes intellisense with auto-complete, snippets, formatting, etc.

It is currently free, but not for long. Once version 3 is released (sounds like sometime this month), they are going to start charging for it.

SQL Intellisense, Intellisense for SQL Server - SQL Prompt