Coolest. Tool. Ever.

I’m struggling with how to best start this post. Here are a few possibilities:

• I like to think that I’m a hard person to impress. But…
• I swear at my computer many times a day, but usually in anger and almost never in delighted surprise.
• Someone deserves a raise.
• Holy crap!

All of them apply, so you can take your pick.

But what am I talking about?

I’m talking about the DocumentReflector tool that’s included with the Open XML Format SDK v2.0.

You see, I’ve been playing today with a few Office development tasks today for a work-related project. I’ve never looked too closely at working with the Office Open XML file format before this week; I’ve read white papers and such, but until you start writing your own code you never really “get” what an API is all about. After a few false starts and many searches, I was less than impressed.

But then I discovered DocumentReflector. This is a stand-alone SDK tool that will (wait for it) let you open an Office Open XML document, select a subset of the document or the entire document and it (here it comes) displays the C# code that will create it.

Holy crap indeed.

I’m sure I’ll be swearing at this amazing tool before the weekend is over (the new wears off pretty quickly for me) but today whoever built this app is officially my hero.

Edit: I almost forgot to add – there’s a great overview of using this tool on Erika Ehrli’s blog, here.

Now I can’t help but ask why we don’t have a tool like this for SSIS packages. Wouldn’t it be great to point a utility at a DTSX file and have it output the code required to build that package through the SSIS API? ;-)

Spatial Demo Goodness

If you’re someone who presents on SQL Server topics, you have probably run into something of a wall when it comes to getting interesting spatial data sets to demonstrate. The spatial data included with the SQL Server 2008 sample databases is functional, but not particularly complex or interesting. There is free spatial data available for many different sources online, but it tends to be difficult to find, in different formats, and annoyingly difficult to load into SQL Server.[1] And of course, the not-free spatial content out there tends to be really, really not-free, and while it may make sense to pay a premium price if you are developing premium software, but for demo purposes this is generally a non-starter.

Enter GeoNames.

GeoNames is an open source provider of spatial data. Essentially they have many disparate sources of free spatial content and have aggregated them into a single location, with many different access methods. They support web service access (and publish a nice set of client libraries too) which is nice for direct application integration, but to me the cool factor comes from the ability to download text dumps of the whole database or just the countries you want. Because then you can load the data into SQL Server 2008 and let the demo goodness begin.

And Ed Katibah, PM for the SQL Server spatial team, has posted instructions for loading GeoNames data into SQL Server 2008. It’s great to have these steps documented because there are quite a few of them, but hopefully you’ll only need to perform them once.

So if you have been waiting for great spatial data that’s available for free, wait no longer.

I should also point out that I became aware of this cool resource not based on my own hard work and research, but instead because of the excellent Simple Talk newsletter that Red Gate Software produces. And I should probably mention that the primary reason I blogged about it is that my friend and colleague, senior SQL Server trainer and all-around good guy Chris Randall has been working on building better spatial demo sets, and I’ve heard rumors that  he occasionally reads this blog. Hopefully this will save him (and you, and me) some work…

 

[1] Please keep in mind that I don’t claim to be a SQL Server spatial expert, so what is “annoyingly difficult” for me may be “exceptionally simple” for someone with more experience, but it likely to be “annoyingly difficult” for many people.