Time for another MSDN Ultimate Giveaway!

The first MSDN giveaway that I did today was just to easy.  Time for something that takes a little more work.

Put together a quick blog post (or feel free to put it in a comment here) about what really kick ass software you are thinking you could develop with this free MSDN license.  (If you do a blog post be sure to do a ping back to this post so I can find your post.)

I’m not going to hold you to it, but hopefully you’ll actually make the software.

This is for a full blown MSDN Ultimate license.  It comes with everything that a paid for MSDN license comes with except: No MSDN Magazine, no support calls, no free Office 2010 license.  You get the rest of the Microsoft software suite for development and testing.

I’ll take the people who respond and put the names into a hat and pick one at random.

All comments and blog posts need to be posted by 6pm Pacific time today (winner will be announced shortly after that on my blog and twitter).  Be sure that I know how to get a hold of you, or that your contact info is in your about page on your blog or something.

Good luck,

Denny

PS. If you’ve already won a license from me, no you can’t win a second one.

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7 Responses

  1. Talk about a step up in difficulty from finding out your email address! haha

    I would leverage an MSDN ultimate license to attempt to build a kick ass SQL Server DBA repository. I’m not talking about a single table holding a list of all the SQL Server instances you manage either. The ultimate goal would be an automated process that gathers information about all of the instances in the environment daily. This information can be viewed on demand from reporting services or web pages. There would be configurable alerting rules that would email the DBA distribution list. An example would be for databases without a backup in x amount of days. The features would be selectable so you can get a basic amount of information without any changes on the production instances.
    There are similar programs / scripts that get you comparable information but I have found most of them either only gets some of the information DBA’s need or require configuration on each instance. I’m hoping to setup something that provides all the information with minimal footprint. This would be a great tool in troubleshooting issues as you can easily identify any login changes, sudden database file growth, or schema changes regardless of the SQL Server instance version.
    Thanks Denny for the chance to win! @ocjames

  2. Darn forgot to add that my app and source code would be available freely to the SQL Server community. Hopefully people would contribute and make the application even more useful for everyone!

  3. Thanks Denny for providing this opportunity.
    If I had an MSDN ultimate license, I’d like to build a set of CLR stored procedures that can read my emails, which contains my instructions for the sql server instances. The purpose is to have sql server read my email in a specific email account, and respond to my instructions (which will be pre-defined). This way, I can always check my server status from any computer / smartphone that can access email. As a DBA, I am always interested in knowing “what / how are my sql servers are doing?” (same purpose as that of Twitter). I will share my code once I am done at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/jeffrey_yao

  4. hi,

    I would like to dvelop a software to export a database in a xml-file which i can use for the bdc in sharepoint. it would be open source of course

  5. Thanks for providing this opportunity!

    I have in mind several related apps that I would use the MSDN ultimate license to build. I would build an app to monitor all of our SQL Server isntances and integrate with a task management utility so that I could keep track of routine maintenance and project specific tasks and tie tasks to monitoring (bit of a scaled down Operations Manager).

    I’ve seen many similar features I would like to see in this app in other apps but I’ve never found one app that does exactly everything I would like just the way I would use it. I would make this an open source project so that others could benefit because I know it can soetimes be frustrating finding just the right tool that works for your unique circumstances.

  6. Denny great idea!

    If I was fortunate enough to win Ultimate I would use the license to attempt to develop a snap-in to SSMS that would simplify script promotions to UAT/ Prod environments that would allow for automating and setup of various backout mechanisms just prior to executing script such as using XACT_ABORT,diff, full, tran backups, schema scripting and data export, snapshoting, snapshots on mirror and providing simple recovery interface.
    …the first one of many possibilities for the sql community.

    Best of Luck to all entrants!

  7. My idea is very similar to RobA’s. As a DBA, I’m always looking for a way to look at and compare server and database options across multiple instances. I’d also like a way of checking performance. I’m picturing my app as written in Silverlight. It would be a windows app running locally, but I’d also build a web browser component to view the data from anywhere, even on a Smart Phone.

    Thanks for running the contests for the MSDN subscriptions.

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