When I was writing my introductory post about the newly released version of SQL Server or more precisely about just a CTP (Community Technology Preview) version, I complained about an apparent lack of graphical tools similar to SQL Server Management Studio or at least similar to Visual Studio Server Explorer. Such a lack made an exploration of indeed promising features of SQL Server CE 4.0 a slightly tricky task. However, as I pointed out in my previous post that shouldn’t  actually prevent programmers from playing with this database, because in spite of non-existence of GUI tools there was already an API released, thus it was possible to interact with the database system by just issuing SQL statements from C# or any other .NET language.

However, I was wrong in my statement about a lack of GUI tools, in fact they do exists. More...

• What SQL Server CE 4.0 means for ASP.NET developers
• Where to get and how to install
• How do I create my tables?!!

When I came across a story on the newest version of SQL Server CE by Scott Guthrie, as well as a blog post in the SQL Server CE team blog, I was amazed that it was possible to run on a web server for ASP.NET application in the Medium Trust mode without any installation. This literally means that finally one can use SQL for storing data even though their hosting plan, for example, doesn’t allow having a SQL Server database. More...

Facebook has recently released a new tool for accessing its vast amount of data. The name of the tool is the Graph API. The Graph API allows you to literally interact with any Facebook object, including users, their photos, posts, groups, pages, as well as connections between object, i.e. listing people’s friends, group members and page fans, etc. Moreover, this interaction isn’t only single-directional, in fact you can also modify object, add and delete them. More...