The following is a guest post from good friend and SEO and PPC expert, Amberly Stitzel.

by Amberly Stitzel

When it comes to dating it seems like everyone is trying to find "The One." It appears we are trying to meet the same goal with Pay Per Click (PPC) ad copy. We all want to find the one ad text that can generate the highest Click Through Rate (CTR) thus getting more qualified users in the door for a lower Cost Per Click (CPC).

Recently I've been working with a local not for profit organization.  Early on in my meetings with them it was discussed that they needed a new website.  I offered my services and suggestions through numerous emails and lunch meetings.  At then end of that initial run I had suggested a new website using one of a number of Content Management Systems (CMS) available on the market.  The organization members at that last meeting thanked me and stated that they had someone volunteer to design, code, and host a solution for them.  "Great," I thought, "less work for me to do."

It was in my next coorespondance with this group that made me a little nervous about their choice.  It turned out that the volunteer was actually selling his services as a design group and host provider.  We discussed his proposed solution and I pointed out some of the limitations that I thought would hurt this particular venture.  The designer assured me that he had a custom designed, home grown application that would be perfect for them, and promptly pushed me aside.

I've taken a new position with a relatively new custom web development firm.  I've completed 2 full weeks with the new company.  So far it's been really exciting.

With the new position I've had the opportunity to work on some newer technologies.  For my first project I've had to chance to use Visual Studio 2008, C# with ASP.NET 3.5, SQL Server 2008, ADO.NET Entity Framework, LINQ to Entities, and more.  New development with new technologies is a welcome change.  It seems a lot of my career has been enhancement and maintenance programming on existing systems.

My question to my readers is, of the technologies listed above, what would you like the next few posts to focus on?  Please contribute to the discussion by adding your comments below. 

Recently, I was working on a project that used ASP.NET Membership and Profiles.  The application worked great, but there was a problem with the user profile data and reporting. 

Using aspnet Membership and Profiles is great.  It's quite easy to retrieve, update, and insert profile data using .NET.  However, our reporting team was having difficulty retrieving the user profile data for their reporting cubes and data warehouse.  This wouldn't be a problem using CLR in SQL Server 2005 or 2008, but for this particular project we were still on SQL Server 2000.

After an exhaustive web search I was unable to find any quick and easy way to retrieve the data using anything other than .NET code.  This simply would not do.  Surely there is a way to do this, right?  Perhaps a User Defined Function?

So, I set about writing my own User Defined Function for this project.