Southampton SQL Server User Group

A: I've started programming as a hobby in high school. It turned out it was also the most fun way to gain enough money to put myself through college and to get a lot of experience. I studied medical cybernetics which is a branch of electrical engineering which gave me a good insight into building complex interconnected systems. Once you have to build an electrical medical device from scratch and test it on yourself you start appreciating good design, testing and component decoupling which are all basic principles in IT or other kind of engineering.

I'm from Slovenia and have been a SQL Server MVP for a few years now. I've been working with C# and SQL Server developer for about 15 years on various projects from standard line-of-business to image analysis and processing applications. I also develop a popular add-in for SSMS, called the SSMS Tools Pack (http://www.ssmstoolspack.com/).

A: Sharing knowledge. It's the first thing that comes to mind. I try to live by the principle "We all do better when we all do better", and sharing what you know is the best way to achieve that in my opinion. Education is important. Nobody can take what you know away from you. It gives me great pleasure to see people leave with ideas on how to improve their work processes by applying things they learn at such events. I have yet to see a person not have at least one "Oh, I will so use this!" moment.

A: It all started in December 2006 when I talked with a friend from Sweden about the new SSMS for then newly released SQL Server 2005. He was telling me how he misses a few things inside, so this piqued my "must reverse engineer" part of the brain and I started looking into it. I had the first prototype working in about a month. This only included simple CRUD generating capabilities since this was what he was missing. From then on it grew in features and popularity and is now known to over half a million people.

I constantly get emails from people thanking me for it, and even quite a few "you saved my job with it" type emails. It's a good feeling.  I don't know for sure but I think the SSMS Tools Pack was the first add-in for SSMS in the wild. Thinking about it, it'll be 10 years I'm doing it next year. That's a long time sticking with a product.

Q: What will be one of the key things that the attendees will take away from your session?

A: My pre-con is very oriented towards the developer side of SQL and .Net. I aim to show them how to be even better and what they do. I teach things that I have seen the majority of developers don't know about when working with SQL Server and .Net. I always try to finish this pre-con with an eye-opening security demo. There I show how to hack your company and

I've realized this is usually the most eye opening part because security is usually an afterthought. There's something disturbing in showing you your potential weaknesses. I exploit that for educational purposes. :)