Beginning Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Programming

Introduction

And so the journey continues, and, as I've said before, what a long, strange trip it's been. When I first wrote Professional SQL Server 7.0 Programming in early 1999, the landscape of both books and the development world was much different than it is today. At the time, .NET was as yet unheard of, and while Visual Studio 98 ruled the day as the most popular development environment, Java was coming on strong and alternative development tools, such as Delphi, were still more competitive than they typically are today. The so-called "dot com" era was booming, and the use of database management systems (DBMS), such as SQL Server, was growing exponentially.

There was, however, a problem. While one could find quite a few books on SQL Server, they were all oriented toward the administrator. They spent tremendous amounts of time and energy on things that the average developer did not give a proverbial hoot about. Something had to give, and as my development editor and I pondered the needs of the world, we realized that we could not solve world hunger or arms proliferation ourselves, but we could solve the unrealized need for a new kind of SQL book–one aimed specifically at developers.

At the time, I wrote Professional SQL Server 7.0 Programming to be everything to everyone. It was a compendium. It started at the beginning and progressed to a logical end. The result was a very, very large book that filled a void for a lot of people (hooray!).

With SQL Server 2005, SQL Server was ...