By: Shannon Margolis

Microsoft’s .NET technology is a technology designed to connect. What to connect? Well everything that can be connected through software – people, systems, computers, and other things and devices.

A more thorough definition of .NET would be that it is a top level domain, initially designed to be used by Internet Service Providers, but now it has expanded and everyone can make use of a .net domain. It uses the Internet DNS (domain Naming System) and it is an abbreviation of the word ‘network’.

.NET can hold servers that provide web services or the tools needed to create these services.

What are Web Services and their benefits? Well they can be called enhancements that help businesses expand and connect with their customers and partners. Their benefits are that they make the communication between business partners much easier and even increase the profits by making a business known and available to much more people through the help of the Internet.

An Important part of the .Net technology and framework is the ASP.net set of technologies. These web development technologies are used in the creation of Websites and Web services usable on the .NET infrastructure.

ASP.NET was built by Microsoft from one of their older technologies and web programmers can use any programming language they want to write ASP.NET, from Perl to C# and of course Visual Basic.NET and any other language understood by the .NET technology.

The advantages of the ASP.NET technology are that it makes building Websites, Web applications and Web services very easy and with less code that older languages. Also, the applications compiled in ASP.NET run faster and with less errors

You can find many free tutorials and documentation about how to use the .NET framework and about the ASP.Net platform so getting started in this domain can be pretty easy. You can also find many examples amd articles about things that are easy to make and that you can study and use for learning and understanding. After learning a little you will be able to create easy-to-build applications that allow users to organize their own page’s appearance.

Also, if you’re going to use ASP.NET applications you should get one of the specially designed software packages for ASP , like Visual Studio.NET or the ASP.NET Web Matrix.

So the .NET and ASP.NET technologies are very popular and have an extremely large number of business-enhancing uses and applications.

A good place to start learning more about how people-ready applications and systems can be built using the .NET 2.0 framework is the Microsoft Practice section of www.unitekconsulting.com.

By: Shannon Margolis

A SQL (Structured Query Language) server is a complete system designed for the purpose of database management, development and administration. With the help of the SQL server software, users are able to create and handle large relational or structural databases and develop applications that increase the effectiveness of their business.

Microsoft SQL Server has always been the best database platform. It provides secure storage and when it comes to working with large databases no other product can be compared with SQL server. It is also very closely related to Visual Studio and The office suite, so it’s perfect for both database administrators and people who work with smaller and simpler databases

SQL servers have a large number of powerful tools that facilitate database maintenance, and administration. Among the most important ones are the Enterprise Manager, the Service Manager and the Query analyzer.

The Enterprise Manager allows its user to manage all the SQL server installations on a network and control all the databases from it. The Service Manager is responsible for controlling the processes and services of an SQL server Finally, the Query analyzer processes all the queries against any of the SQL databases.

The first version of Microsoft SQL server was released in 1993, the same time Windows NT 3.1 came out on the market, and after a few years, Microsoft SQL server 2000 was released. Compared to its previous versions, SQL server 2000 brings a lot of improvements and interesting new features, like XML support, functions that can be defined by the users themselves, indexed views and new data types. Also, some of the features that existed in the previous versions were enhanced in Microsoft SQL server 2000. Among the features that were enhanced you can find the full text search feature, the DBCC and. the backup and restore processes.

The last version of Microsoft SQL server was released in 2005 and it was, of course, called Microsoft SQL server 2005. This version is quite faster than SQL server 2000 and in the five years that passed since the first one was released a lot of new improvements and enhancements have been done. SQL server 2005 is not only a database administration tool, it also contains Messaging technologies, OLAP and Server integration services. It has a large variety of management tools integrated also and its security and database encryption systems have been seriously improved.

T-Sql has been implemented in order to handle errors better and the XML integration has gone deeper, now allowing XML to be stored in databases.

The new features of SQL 2005 are too many to enumerate, so we’ll just take a look at a few of the most important ones:

Database mirroring – if a database fails, the application connects to another database from a secondary server, and transfer isn’t interrupted Snapshots – if loss of data occurs or someone just made a mistake and modified some important data everything can be recovered because SQL server periodically takes ’snapshots’ of the database and uses them to restore the data Support for 64 bit processors Business Intelligence features built into SQL Server Analysis Services and Reporting Services Significant security upgrades Enhanced encryption capabilities .NET CLR, and Visual Studio integration

..and many more other useful features

SQL server 2000 and SQL server 2005 are the best and the most complex database management tools on the market, and they can do much more than just managing and administrating databases, so they are the best choice if your company needs database administration and maintenance.

A good source for more information on how to install, customize, and make the most use of a SQL Server implementation, visit the Microsoft practice section of www.unitekconsulting.com.