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.