Josh Ledgard reports on three days he spent last week building an app with the beta of Visual Studio 2005. Nice to know the PMs use the same tools they inflict onsend to the rest of us. :-)

Now this sounds interesting: SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. Among other things, it supports 4G databases, instead of MSDE’s current 2G limit, and XCopy deployment of databases (in other words, just copy the database file to the correct location). It’ll be interesting to see how/if this changes database deployment. One of the nice things about Fox deployment is that you can just copy the files around as part of the install: to do that with SQL Server, you would have had to do one of several things as a separate process within the install. Since I’ve never deployed a SQL Server solution, I don’t know what the optimum process is.

Note on the 4G limit: VFP has a 2G limit, but the limit is per file, not per database. If you partition your virtual table correctly, you can access data sets that are quite a bit bigger than 2G.