I am upgrading around 100 projects from 2.0 and 3.5 and was wondering if there was a bulk update in VS 2008 that I wasn't aware of.

Doing some searching it would seem not

One alternative would be write an application to add a few items to the csproj file.

(System.Data.Entity added to target 3.5 SP1)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb398197.aspx

In the end I did it manually

There have been numerous article recently on the performance of the FTSE over the last decade

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/markets/ftse100/6913344/FTSE-100s-recent-rally-fails-to-make-up-for-a-lost-decade.html

with only a few commenting on the effect that dividends have on returns

http://business.scotsman.com/economics/Dividends-help-investments-pay-off.5951967.jp

The FTSE 100 sans dividends is down 22% over the period

whereas if we included dividends, we would get a return of around 8%

This is still pretty poor compared to the (very approx) 45% you would've got if you had invested at the base rate

this emphasizes the point that to achieve returns in excess of risk free, one must take a risk. The longer the investment, the less chance of being underwater at maturity, but that risk will always be there.

Just over a year ago I commented on the fact that several bodies in the housing market refused to give their predictions

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/CommentView,guid,87934429-905b-4f5e-8b88-8a876b6a3fbc.aspx

As it turns out, they were all wrong, with both Halifax and Nationwide showing gains YOY.

Whether this will continue when/if QE is withdrawn and interest rates rise remains to be seen.

This was a lot easier than 70-433, and with no problems this time round

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,52983d44-0dc9-45da-bc15-12edb0847f72.aspx

I completed the test in around an hour

Snapshot vs. Serializable

http://blogs.msdn.com/craigfr/archive/2007/05/16/serializable-vs-snapshot-isolation-level.aspx

Partition level locking

http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/PAUL/post/SQL-Server-2008-Partition-level-lock-escalation-details-and-examples.aspx

Lock compatibility

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186396.aspx

Sat my first exam over a decade ago, have done around 20 since then but haven't sat any since 2003. I fancied looking at the 2008 qualification to see what was new in 2008 (currently have experience with SQL 7-2005). I bought the MS book

http://www.amazon.co.uk/MCTS-Self-Paced-Training-Exam-70-433/dp/0735626391/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259307240&sr=8-1

read that and then bought ther Transcender to see what areas the book hadn't covered

http://www.transcender.com/product.aspx?product_id=Cert-70-433

The problems started when I attempted to book the test at a test centre near me

and got this message. I phoned up the help desk and was informed that this error message indicated that the testing centre in question did not offer that particular exam. Instead I booked the exam at QA in Holborn.

I turned up at the testing centre yesterday and was informed that because of earlier problems with the Prometric system, I wouldn't be able to start my exam at the scheduled time. Eventually I was able to start at around 15 minutes after planned.

The first few questions were completely different to Transcender - fortunately I was able to rely on experience gained over the years. The problems started when I got to one of the questions as instead of seeing an embedded screenshot instead saw code that was intended to display the image. Two other questions referred to an exhibit, but teh exhibit button was nowhere to be seen! Another question had some XML that wasn't displayed properly. Finally, one of the questions had two answer options that appeared to be the same.

I complained to the attendant, he contacted Prometric and they suggested rebooting the box. This made no difference - when rebooted the test continued where it had left off. By this point I was fed up, and was seriously considering coming back another when they had sorted the test out. However, when I completed the test I thought I may as well go back through and check my reponses, and guess the questions mentioned above. I completed the test and left a few choice comments. It took an age for the results to come up, and imagine my surprise when I had passed!

The drama wasn't over yet. I went up to reception to pick up my exam results. However, the results had not yet been printed. After the drama, I was convinced that the results had been lost, but after waiting around for quarter of an hour, the printer was fixed and I had my piece of paper. Next stop 70-451

Saw a leaflet in the FT today. Can't find it on the website, but found this

http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/media1/research/qtrly_regional_comments.asp

Interesting to see that Greater London is already 25% off peak

Was ~320k (this figure has been adjusted)

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,f6aea8d2-ce5c-42d4-8d20-90fd4d636840.aspx

(rows 1285 on 2nd and 3rd tabs)

http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/media/excel/24_04_09historicdata.xls

Now £241,306

http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/media/pdfs/research/GreaterLondonQ12009.pdf

Wikipedia page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rosenfeld

Good read

http://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Genius-Failed-Capital-Management/dp/1841155047/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240932983&sr=8-1

I have mentioned before that there is a link between mortgage approvals and house prices six months from now

http://www.houseprices.uk.net/articles/house_price_predictor/

and I thought I would look at when approvals started heading south

BBA:

BOE

In July 2007, both BBA and BOE approvals dropped dramtically. That is not to say that they wouldn't pick up again, but couple this with the Goldman hedge fund

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/article2253691.ece

and the XOver breaking through 500

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,3a000888-e5df-4208-9515-01586f6332f2.aspx

indicated that as was not well. Did we know then that things were going to be as bas as they are? Probably not - see my comments on whether the XOver would break through 1000.

UK GDP numbers are released in theory a total of three times for a given quarter. For Q4 we have

23/01/2009: Advance

25/02/3009: Preliminary

27/03/2009: Final

Q3 final number (23/12/2008) was -0.6% (revised down from -0.5% (P)), and has subsequently been revised down to -0.7%

Today's Q4 preliminary number was unchanged at -1.5%

Looking at the bigger picture, things aren't quite as bad as the 90s recession. Yet.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/47931550-f874-11dd-aae8-000077b07658.html

Reading this article, I was wondering whether the two statements
"Even under what seem like extreme scenarios for UK and US house prices, many people agree that few mortgage bonds outside subprime definitely look expensive. "
"Also, for example, Fitch Ratings recently said that under its stress testing, which included the assumption of a 30 per cent fall in house prices, no mortgage bond rated triple A in the UK would see a downgrade."
are linked. In particular, is 30% fall in house prices considered to be an extreme scenario?  I belive the 30% reflects a peak to trough estimate

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8305276e-ebdf-11dd-8838-0000779fd2ac.html

yet when the derivatives market are pricing in 46% peak to trough,

http://www.tfspropertyderivatives.com/pdf/RISK&MANAGE/2009/Feb-09.pdf

30% seems very optimistic.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fb6d3b8c-f8a6-11dd-aae8-000077b07658.html

"The world's most highly rated countries have for the first time been put into different categories reflecting their risks for credit downgrades, in a sign of the deepening financial crisis."

Reuters have done a little diagram

http://uk.reuters.com/article/UK_COMKTNEWS_MORE/idUKLB77042220090212

It appears that the UK is not best placed after all. Quelle surprise!

"Law firms offering graduates a median starting salary of £37,000 a year remained the highest payers. Investment banks were in second place, offering £35,000.

In third place, at £28,000 a year, were the business and financial services sectors"

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/53e54c1e-f0af-11dd-972c-0000779fd2ac.html

"Gordon Brown was on Sunday night accused of having “learnt nothing” from the economic crisis after he defended unorthodox mortgage loans worth 125 per cent of the value of a home.

After he was pressed on whether he should “shoulder the blame” for lax lending practices, Mr Brown insisted “high percentage mortgages” were fine as long as interest rates were low"

Astonishing that he believes this.

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,bc024a3b-6d2a-4ea1-bd0e-052811080655.aspx

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aYgTyVZ.8T.A&refer=europe

Nothing unusual in that, but prior to this, NOKIA was a company that had CDS issued, but no debt outstanding

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,1bd7fe10-3b83-4e76-abc0-2e85b40483d5.aspx

I was reading this

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/417d0086-ee6f-11dd-b791-0000779fd2ac.html

written by (I believe)

http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/experts/875/david_richards.html

and at first I was angry at the fact that the FT had allowed such drivel to be posted, but I guess they can't be experts on every letter that is published. I posted this article in the FT Long Room

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/longroom/

to check that it wasn't just me that had these thoughts. Everyone there agreed that it was tosh. However, before I continue, I must say that I have an obvious bias as I work in the industry. Onto the letter...

Only if the rest of the market agreed with you, but what do you gain over shorting the share. Furthermore, is there a 100% correlation between the credit and equity markets?

Credit lagging

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,97625e8e-abff-4934-846b-74e07d785307.aspx

or leading?

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,6ff32223-b54c-4ac6-b1e3-6baf7d232c07.aspx

I'm sure David has the answer!

“On the other hand, if I were the US government, and had understood Mr Soros’s analysis, I could have stopped the Lehman bear raid in its tracks. When Lehman came under pressure, the US government should have entered the systemically important credit default swap market that AIG had vacated, and begun aggressive writing of credit default swaps on Lehman securities”

Assuming there was such a thing as a Lehman bear raid, the U.S. Government decided to let Lehman fail, so the decision had already been made.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2008/0916/1221430252353.html

The author is implying that the U.S. were unable to save them. AIG has so far drawn $90.3 billion from an emergency loan,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_International_Group

"On the evening of September 16, 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank's Board of Governors announced that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had been authorized to create a 24-month credit-liquidity facility from which AIG may draw up to $85 billion. The loan is collateralized by the assets of AIG, including its non-regulated subsidiaries and the stock of "substantially all" its regulated subsidiaries, and has an interest rate of 850 basis points over the three-month London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) (i.e., LIBOR plus 8.5%). In exchange for the credit facility, the U.S. government will receive warrants for a 79.9 percent equity stake in AIG, and has the right to suspend the payment of dividends to AIG common and preferred shareholders.[1][4] The credit facility was created under the auspices of Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act.[4][24][25] AIG's board of directors announced approval of the loan transaction in a press release the same day. The announcement did not comment on the issuance of a warrant for 79.9% of AIG's equity, but the AIG 8-K filing of September 18, 2008, reporting the transaction to the Securities and Exchange Commission stated that a warrant for 79.9% of AIG shares had been issued to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.[26][5][1] AIG drew down US$ 28 billion of the credit-liquidity facility on September 17, 2008.[27] On September 22, 2008, AIG was officially removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average.[28] An additional $37.8 billion loan was extended in October. As of October 24, AIG has drawn a total of $90.3 billion from the emergency loan, of a total $122.8 billion"

so I can't see why the Fed couldn't have done something similar with Lehman, if it had chosen to do so.

AIG weren’t writing protection on the single name market, as far as I am aware, so I am not sure why that was mentioned. It was writing super senior tranche protection on synthetic corporate CDOs, one of the reasons it wasn't allowed to go under

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,19e80fd2-0f61-4650-8afe-142458df673b.aspx

As we have seen with the ban on short selling in the UK, creating false markets (in this case by selling CDS protection) this doesn’t fix underlying the problem. False markets are not a good thing (see also Government providing mortgage payments on UK properties http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/80b2e400-e1db-11dd-afa0-0000779fd2ac.html) , they just prolong the pain.

With its unlimited balance sheet and no requirement to put up collateral, the government could have prevented the price of Lehman credit default swaps from, as Mr Soros writes, “going though the roof"

Did Lehman spreads go through the roof?

They did gap out, but what is David proposing, that we ban CDS from reflecting what the market believes is a company's chance of defaulting? Has he any evidence that spreads widening is self fulfilling?

http://0-ftalphaville.ft.com.innopac.up.ac.za/blog/2009/01/06/50811/glencore-time-to-come-clean/

Is there smoke without fire?

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,38ea0de9-82a7-488c-8c2a-5cdd2f0928dc.aspx

The government could have prevented financial meltdown

By preventing ultra low interest rates, and the Greenspan put, and Clinton not encouraging people to buy a house they couldn't afford, then yes,

but by selling CDS protection on Lehman, I doubt it!

Credit default swaps, in massive quantities, are still out there and still causing havoc

Vague hysterical sentences are meaningless, unfortunately. The CDS market survived a massive shock when Lehman went under.

“Even though no organisation of consequence is now writing credit default swaps, the exorbitant prices of "marks" on them still govern accountants’ (“fair value”) pricing of bonds and, in turn, regulatory capital requirements”

So the CDS market is acting as an efficient price discovery mechanism – is this a bad thing?

The Government has discussed trade credit insurance, not writing CDS

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2009/01/insurance_that_worsens_crunch.html

“If the authorities had understood the Soros analysis several years ago, and unattached credit default swaps had been banned, the credit bubble and bust would never have occurred.”
 

See my comments above. The securitization market (not plain corporate CDS) may have accentuated the boom, but policy mistakes started it