Yay! MS have a shiney new website just for IIS at http://www.iis.net. If I were you, my first port of call would be the .NET show interview with Bill Staples and Scot Guthrie where they show off some of the really cool features that are going to be part of IIS7.

Colin just pointed me at this from RedGate Software (via Scott Guthries blog). Works a treat in both SQL Server 2000 Query Analyser and SQL Server Management Studio.

Download it from here.

Sparkplug (Dave) you're right about not expecting the ORDER BY clause to guarantee which results are returned by the TOP clause but in if you look at the execution plans for the view run on SQL 2000 and then on SQL 2005 we can see that SQL 2000 doesn't optimise out the ORDER BY:

Here's the view

create view [dbo].[testtop] as
select top 100 percent * from prop_tbl_virtualtour order by propertyid

Here's the actual execution plan on SQL Server 2000 and we can see that the ORDER BY clause is honoured -

and this is the actual execution plan on SQL Server 2005, the ORDER BY is removed because TOP 100 PERCENT is returning all rows -

I'd say that's a breaking change, the behaviour in SQL Server 2000 is pretty consistent across a fairly wide selection of test cases.

Over the weekend I migrated various databases to SQL Server 2005 only to find that the hierarchical menus on the websites using the databases were incomplete and out of order.

After a few hours of head scratching I discovered some views along the lines of -

SELECT TOP 100 PERCENT col1, col2, col3
FROM sometable
ORDER BY col1, col2

The ORDER BY clause should only be used in views under certain conditions i.e. when using the TOP operator and the above view worked just fine under SQL Server 2000.

However in SQL Server 2005, the query optimiser optimises out TOP 100 PERCENT because it recognises that no rows are being eliminated from the resultset and because of this optimisation it also optimises out the the ORDER BY clause.

After a few disappointing months with Skype, I decided to try SIP based VOIP. The difference is quite incredible. I bought myself a proper VOIP handset - a Grandstream GXP 2000 and signed up with http://www.voip.co.uk/ and SIPGate.

Both allow me to have proper telephone numbers and even better Perth ones too for just signing up, although voip.co.uk does take your credit card number.

The sound quality of the calls is on par with that of a standard BT voice call or slightly better but the stability of the calls is way better than that of Skype. There's no jitter and delay and it just seems so much more polished.

Another advantage of SIP is that you don't need the PC turned on all the time because the handset plugs into an ethernet port on the switch.

The disadvantages are that for the SIP/VOIP newbies the terminology is pretty opaque and it took me a while to work out why I couldn't receive inbound calls and this is why Skype is a more attractive proposition than SIP/VOIP. There's a UK news group for the technology - uk.telecom.voip - but having lurked on it for a while and posted one message, you are presumed to have a grounding in the workings of SIP/VOIP if you're looking for help. The knowledge on how to get this stuff up and running is pretty technically in-depth and somewhat scattered. It's not really boiled down enough for your average Joe Schmoe who really wants to sign up with a provider and plug in his phone and start making/receiving calls. At the end of the day I don't really care what vocoder to use or what RTP, STUN or SIP/SDP message are, just tell me what I need to get the phone working.

That said, once you overcome the technical hurdles, it's pretty neat.