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Visual Studio
Microsoft Visual Studio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from
Microsoft. It can be used to develop console and graphical user interface
applications along with Windows Forms applications, web sites, web applications,
and web services in both native code together with managed code for all
platforms supported by Microsoft Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows CE, .NET
Framework, .NET Compact Framework and Microsoft Silverlight. Visual Studio
includes a code editor supporting IntelliSense as well as code refactoring. The
integrated debugger works both as a source-level debugger and a machine-level
debugger.
Other built-in tools include a forms designer for building GUI applications, web
designer, class designer, and database schema designer. It accepts plug-ins that
enhance the functionality at almost every level—including adding support for
source control systems (like Subversion and Visual SourceSafe) to adding new
toolsets like editors and visual designers for domain-specific languages or
toolsets for other aspects of the software development lifecycle (like the Team
Foundation Server client: Team Explorer).
Visual Studio supports languages by means of language services, which allow the
code editor and debugger to support (to varying degrees) nearly any programming
language, provided a language-specific service exists. Built-in languages
include C/C++ (via Visual C++), VB.NET (via Visual Basic .NET), and C# (via
Visual C#). Support for other languages such as F#, M, Python, and Ruby. It also supports
XML/XSLT, HTML/XHTML, JavaScript and CSS. Language-specific versions of Visual
Studio also exist which provide more limited language services to the user.
These individual packages are called Microsoft Visual Basic, Visual J#, Visual
C#, and Visual C++.
SQL Server
SQL Server 2005 (codenamed Yukon), released in October 2005, is the successor to
SQL Server 2000. It included native support for managing XML data, in addition
to relational data. For this purpose, it defined an xml data type that could be
used either as a data type in database columns or as literals in queries. XML
columns can be associated with XSD schemas; XML data being stored is verified
against the schema. XML is converted to an internal binary data type before
being stored in the database. Specialized indexing methods were made available
for XML data. XML data is queried using XQuery; SQL Server 2005 added some
extensions to the T-SQL language to allow embedding XQuery queries in T-SQL. In
addition, it also defines a new extension to XQuery, called XML DML, that allows
query-based modifications to XML data. SQL Server 2005 also allows a database
server to be exposed over web services using TDS packets encapsulated within
SOAP (protocol) requests.
When the data is accessed over web services, results
are returned as XML. For relational data, T-SQL has been augmented with error
handling features (try/catch) and support for recursive queries (Common Table
Expressions). SQL Server 2005 has also been enhanced with new indexing
algorithms and better error recovery systems. Data pages are check summed for
better error resiliency, and optimistic concurrency support has been added for
better performance. Permissions and access control have been made more granular
and the query processor handles concurrent execution of queries in a more
efficient way. Partitions on tables and indexes are supported natively, so
scaling out a database onto a cluster is easier. SQL CLR was introduced with SQL
Server 2005 to let it integrate with the .NET Framework.
The current version of SQL Server, SQL Server 2008, (code-named "Katmai") was
released (RTM) on August 6, 2008 and aims to make data management self-tuning,
self organizing, and self maintaining with the development of SQL Server Always
On technologies, to provide near-zero downtime. SQL Server 2008 also includes
support for structured and semi-structured data, including digital media formats
for pictures, audio, video and other multimedia data. In current versions, such
multimedia data can be stored as BLOBs (binary large objects), but they are
generic bitstreams. Intrinsic awareness of multimedia data will allow
specialized functions to be performed on them. According to Paul Flessner,
senior Vice President, Server Applications, Microsoft Corp., SQL Server 2008 can
be a data storage backend for different varieties of data: XML, email,
time/calendar, file, document, spatial, etc as well as perform search, query,
analysis, sharing, and synchronization across all data types.
Other new data
types include specialized date and time types and a Spatial data type for
location-dependent data. Better support for unstructured and semi-structured
data is provided using the new FILESTREAM data type, which can be used to
reference any file stored on the file system. Structured data and metadata about
the file is stored in SQL Server database, whereas the unstructured component is
stored in the file system. Such files can be accessed both via Win32 file
handling APIs as well as via SQL Server using T-SQL; doing the latter accesses
the file data as a BLOB. Backing up and restoring the database backs up or
restores the referenced files as well.
SQL Server 2008 also natively supports
hierarchical data, and includes T-SQL constructs to directly deal with them,
without using recursive queries. The Full-Text Search functionality has been
integrated with the database engine, which simplifies management and improves
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