HTTP concurrent connections from IE - AJAX

I have been stumbling across articles about the two-concurrent-connection limit of IE7 recently.
Tools like the Visual Round Trip Analyzer from Microsoft also mention this in the set of criteria they evaluate against.
It seems that in IE8 the limit of 2 connections is increased to 6 as per here:
AJAX - Connectivity Enhancements in Internet Explorer 8

But it can also be tweaked in IE7 and below as decsribed in the KB article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/183110

Other links:
12 Steps To Faster Web Pages With Visual Round Trip Analyzer

Case Study: Much ado about Browser's HTTP connection

Nested JOINS (mix of inner and outer joins in SQL)

I just ran into this today:
Be Careful When Mixing INNER and OUTER Joins


It's not rocket science, but it can be somewhat counter-intuitive. How to tell the SQL server query engine what you want as an inner join vs an outer join.

I ended up using the nested join syntax by the way, seems cleanest to me and is not relying on the position of the JOIN line in the query.

Basically:

select People.PersonName, Pets.PetName, PetTypes.PetType
from People
left outer join
(Pets inner join PetTypes on Pets.PetTypeID = PetTypes.PetTypeID)
on Pets.OwnerID = People.PersonID

Stored Procedures - Best Practices

Excellent post where Aaron Bertrand shares his best practices for developing stored procedures covering both coding style as well as some coding best practices (good use of NOCOUNT etc).

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/aaron_bertrand/archive/2008/10/30/my-stored-procedure-best-practices-checklist.aspx

Windows Azure - behold the cloud

A lot of buzz is being generated at the moment about the Microsoft Azure Services platform. Here is a brief collection of links to get started on it.

Microsoft’s official Azure site, containing links to the key parts of the platform and documentation:
http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx

Microsoft's official press release:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-27PDCDay1PR.mspx

Overview blog post by Paul Gielens:
http://weblogs.asp.net/pgielens/archive/2008/10/27/a-lap-around-windows-azure.aspx

Some details on how the Windows Azure back end infrastructure is laid out:
http://blogs.msdn.com/domgreen/archive/2008/10/30/windows-azure-back-end.aspx

Getting Started with Windows Azure - The Cloud Computing Tools Team has a nice post gathering together the downloads, tools and some information about the tools and SDK:
http://blogs.msdn.com/cloud/archive/2008/10/27/getting-started-windows-azure-tools-for-microsoft-visual-studio.aspx

Here's a tutorial on the process of storing information in Azure with plenty of screenshots and code samples included in the post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2008/10/29/walkthrough-simple-blob-storage-sample.aspx

A tutorial on the process of getting up and running with Azure, from setting up the development environment to publishing your first application:
http://blogs.msdn.com/olavt/archive/2008/10/30/how-to-create-and-publish-your-first-windows-azure-application.aspx

Clemens Vasters blogs about the Microsoft .Net ServiceBus that is part of the Azure platform:
http://vasters.com/clemensv/PermaLink,guid,92d78bee-2cfd-4a29-95ab-c5abb9b905e7.aspx