Be sure to visit all the options under "Configuration" in the Admin Menu Bar above. There are 16 themes to choose from, and you can also create your own.

After writing a blog entry on "How DO you change your SQL Login Password" and complaining that "neither" SSMS nor SQLCMD allows you to change this" I was using this feature on the June CTP and, lo and behold, both of these utilities allow changing your password.

SQLCMD -? shows
-z new password
-Z new password and exit

And in SSMS, if you use a SQL login whose password has expired (or is designated "must change on first login") you get a nice, GUI-based “old password/new password/re-enter new password” prompt.

Don't know how I missed this before, sorry for complaining. If you use SQL Logins with login policies, code like this really should be part of your application. Perhaps a way to change password before it expires as well, like SQLCMD does. I'm still surprised that SSMS doesn't have this option on the login screen.

Sometime between when I left for Europe and when I started reading email that wasn't addressed "question from student" (yes, I do answer all those), my "Database Geek of the Week" interview got published. By a guy from Red Gate Software named Douglas Reilly.

The way I think this works is that someone suggests you for this honor. I don't know who suggested me, I wasn't told. Then Douglas writes some nice stuff about you and thinks up some questions he'd like to ask. Custom questions, too, from the way they sounded. Cool. He sends them to you and you answer in email. And he publishes questions and answers. Interesting concept.

On "my interview" page, there are links to articles (not mine) about "ADO.NET Data Access" and ".NET 2.0 transaction model". How relevent and coincidental.

Anyway, I'm honored...that someone would take the time to write questions and nice stuff about me and blog/ezine-style publish it. Thanks Douglas.

Wow. I was going through old blog entries looking for some unique insight (TM) I had, once upon a time, about SQL Server 2005 error handling in SQLCLR. Found a bunch of stuff, not sure how unique (or insightful) it was. But...

I realized I've been blogging over a year. First entry, July 1 2004 That's amazing, because I wasn't sure I understood the zen of blogging when I started. Not sure I do now either, but its been a whole year. I realize the entries have been slowing down as SQL Server 2005 has been coming closer to release. And as I start in earnest on the update of the "First Look" book. No technical content to this entry, just mindless reflection.

I just finished up our last gig for SQL Server 2005 Ascend last week in Paris (OK... in Les Ulis). It was my first class on the June CTP, and it seemed to go without incident. Students were enthusiastic and a good time appeared to be had by all. There are a two more "rescheduled for a later date" classes still to be done, but this is for all intents and purposes the end of Ascend phase 2 for us.

The only technical surprise of the week came when I added some rows to a table containing a UDT. After I did a "SELECT * FROM udttab" from SSMS, the rows are displayed in binary (back to the original behavior a la beta1), but when the UDT column contained a NULL value, I got the well-known "Assembly ... or one of its dependencies cannot be found". After making the assembly available I received, not the expected database NULL, but the binary value that corresponded to my UDT when it was NULL. Hmmm. It sounds like a few folks have been asking about this, and its been reported as a bug already. Interesting behavior. Using SQLCMD, the value NULL is displayed as you'd expect.

I just wanted to thank the folks from Ascend and thank the students as well. It's been a great time, I've enjoyed the traveling, the technical challange, and the nice reception that I received everywhere. Au revoir!

Now on to the release...keep on watching for more information.