Many of us by now are familiar with Visio and its Reverse Engineer capability, where you point Visio to a data source and it can generate a somewhat decent database model of the said database. It’s a pretty handy tool to get you started. But what about taking a database diagram and "forward engineering" it? 

Last week I had and project where I needed to normalize a database. The first thing I did was open up Visio and reverse-engineer the existing db. Once I had made all the changes that I wanted to make I downloaded a handy tool from Codeplex that allowed me to "forward engineer" my diagram and generate a script to create the new and improved objects including indexes as well as primary and foreign keys. It is an add-in to Visio and ends up adding a tab to the ribbon for all your Forward Engineering needs. 

After I ran that script on a blank database all I had to do then was run a delta comparison using (SQL Delta) of the new database with the new objects against the old database. That gave me an update script to run on the old database. Once that was done the old database was up to date and was fully normalized to the specs of my Visio diagram.

Do you find yourself flipping through the pages searching for that one detail you wrote down on the back of a page or ever misplaced your notebook for a period of time?
 
Try using Microsoft OneNote.  Once I converted, I realized how nice it is to have one place to gather, organize and share all of my work and personal information.  The application is very easy to use as it works just like a notebook would or even having a file cabinet full of notebooks, only it's lighter weight.
 
6 Reasons OneNote outsmarts your spiral notebook:
• OneNote provides one single place to collect all your ideas, information, photos, videos, screen clips and web links.  You never run out of blank pages or have to carry multiple notebooks.
• The search functionality makes finding a specific idea or action item quick and easy. 
• OneNote integrates with other Office 2010 applications such as Outlook and PowerPoint.   I particularly like being able to flag an item in my notes as a Task and having it appear in my Outlook Tasks.  Or opening a meeting invite on my calendar and clicking the OneNote icon to begin  a new page for meeting notes that is pre-populated with the meeting details such as meeting subject, date and attendees.  
• Share information easily through email.   After a meeting, click the E-mail page button under the Share tab and distribute your meeting notes without having to retype or cut & paste. 
• Record audio (if your laptop has a built in microphone) than search through the audio files later, especially useful for meetings and capturing items you may have missed (this is the one feature I use the most).
• Access your information from anywhere through a Windows-based Smartphone or web browser.  This really comes in handy if your job requires you to be on the move all the time.   
 
Check it out for yourself; there are lots of resources to get you started.  Here are a few good ones I found:  “A quick introduction to OneNote",  Meet OneNote"

I can’t think of too many projects I’ve been involved with that didn’t interact with some type of content in one way or another. While it’s ideal to have the final content to use during development, that’s not always possible.  The content may not exist yet, or it may be confidential  - whatever the case may be I often  need to use sample content as a placeholder while developing.  While I could always copy and paste some text from a website to use as a placeholder there is a better way that gives me much more control and is just as quick and easy. 

In most Microsoft Office apps you can generate a block of sample content by typing =rand() and then pressing enter.   If you want more control over the content that is generated there are two parameters you can include.  The first parameter is the number of paragraphs to generate.  For example =rand(4) will spit out 4 paragraphs.   The second parameter is the number of sentences to include in each paragraph.  So =rand(2,5) will give you 2 paragraphs with 5 sentences in each.  

If you want to generate ‘lorem ipsum’ text you can use =lorem() instead.  With =lorem() you can also pass the two parameters control the number of paragraphs and sentences that are generated.