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The Simple Dollar personal finance blog delves into household budgeting—something more of us should do, but are kept away from by fear of spreadsheets, math, and undue time commitments. Blogger Trent’s solution is simple and reliable, however, and takes only a willingness to collect paper and toss it in a shoe box. Collect one to three months’ worth of receipts, checks, pay stubs, and other paper records of money in and out, drop them on a floor when you’re done, and then arrange them however you’d like:

You’ll probably find yourself shifting piles around and making new piles throughout this process, as you should. The goal is to find ways to group your spending that’s natural to you. Don’t try to force it to match someone else’s groupings - if a group of receipts or statements feel like a natural group to you, that’s how they should be sorted.

Divide each pile by the number of months you’ve been saving, and you’ll have some hard and fast numbers to work with. Sure beats trying to figure out where a hamburger and coke splurge fits into a ledger. Hit the link for a fuller explanation of a simple budget you can use to plan your spending.

Since posting on the topic of design-time and runtime connectivity to pre-release versions of SQL Server 2008 on the Data blog in November, the set of affected clients (applications, runtimes, and operating systems) have been officially released: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5, Microsoft Vista Service Pack 1, and Microsoft Windows 2008. Runtime connectivity from a client system configured with any of these released products to SQL Server 2008 November CTP or later provides full runtime access to the following features (for design-time functionality, see below):< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

·         Table-Valued Parameters

·         New date/time data types

·         Large user-defined types

·         Support for very large FILESTREAM-attributed column data

Design-Time Connectivity Between Visual Studio and SQL Server 2008

Developers using Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008 design tools will receive an error when trying to open a database on any pre-release instance of SQL Server 2008 without installing a Visual Studio patch. Pre-release patches for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005 enable the following Visual Studio functionality for SQL Server 2008:

·         Server Explorer successfully connects to SQL Server 2008, and database objects such as stored procedures and table data can be viewed and edited.

o   Note that table schemas still cannot be viewed or edited in this release.

·         SQL CLR projects that target SQL Server 2008 can be created and deployed to the server.

·         T-SQL and SQL CLR debugging are now enabled for SQL Server 2008.

·         Data binding features in Client and Web Projects are enabled.

Pre-release versions of the design-time patches are currently available: the Visual Studio 2008 CTP patch is available for download here and the Visual Studio 2005 CTP patch is available for download here. Final versions of the patches will be available in the near future. For more information please see the “Connecting to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and 2008″ whitepaper on MSDN.

Debra Dove

Program Manager Lead, Data Programmability

We’re pleased to announce that 64-bit MSDASQL for Windows Server 2003 is now available for download at  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=000364db-5e8b-44a8-b9be-ca44d18b059b. This update will also be available through “Windows Update” soon.< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

What is MSDASQL?

MSDASQL is an OLEDB/ODBC ‘bridge’ that allows applications built on OLEDB and ADO (which uses OLEDB internally) to access data sources through ODBC drivers. MSDASQL ships with the Windows Operating System, and Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 are the first Windows releases to include a 64-bit version of MSDASQL.

Isn’t MSDASQL Deprecated?

Previous messaging on MSDN indicated that a 64-bit version of MSDASQL would not be available. However, we have received numerous requests from customers for this technology and we are making it available on the following Windows operating systems:  Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008. Microsoft has no plan yet to deprecate this technology currently.

Mo Lin

Program Manager, Data Programmability