The Daily Grind 856 by Mike Gunderloy Friday, April 7, 2006

It's been a long week around here - I do hope you get some playtime this weekend. See you on Monday!

• SqlAssist - SQL IntelliSense and script debugging add-in for Visual Studio .NET (2003 or 2005). 45-day trial download is here, registration $29. (via Jay Kimble)
• Banner Server - ASP.NET/SQL 2005 software to serve, track, and manage dynamic ads on any Web site. Pricing from $349.95.
• DynamicPDF for .NET 4.0 - New release of this object-oriented app for building up Acrobat documents from scratch adds form fields, metadata support, prepress support, and more. Community edition download is here, commercial pricing from $399.

• SQL Server 2005 Update from Paul Flessner - Lots of marketing goop here, but there's also the news of yet another new version to be called "SQL Server Everywhere," which as near as I can suss out is some sort of embedded database engine. Given that the Access guys are going with a private version of Jet for Access 12, this seems like potentially the final nail in the coffin of the redistributable Jet engine.
• 25 Free Licenses -- Get 'em while they're hot! - If you sell ads on your Web site, you can get a free copy of Banner Server (well, if you're one of the first 25 who ask for one, anyhow).
• We need to figure this out - WSS - Apparently the SharePoint team forgot about Reflector when leaving things in their source code.
• Connect Google Talk to AIM, MSN, & Yahoo - Instructions for using GTalks as a universal IM client. As with other universal solutions (Miranda and Trillian), it appears that getting MSN to play nice is the biggest nuisance; for all their talk about openness and interoperability, Microsoft lags badly in this arena. (via Matt Berther)

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Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.