For the past three years of so, I've been blogging about my experiences with Microsoft SQL Server and the lessons I've learned along the way. During that time, I posted some pretty good tutorials, if I do say so myself. In particular, I regularly commented on an often underutilized facet of SQL Server called Notification Services.

For those not very familiar with the topic, Notification Services was initially released as add-on to SQL Server 2000. It's a highly scalable development framework and hosting platform for notification applications. It's based on technologies that most of us already know and love - namely T-SQL, the .NET Framework, and XML. Sounds great right?

With the release of SQL Server 2005, the add-on was brought into the product in a proper manner. It is no longer implemented using extended stored procedures and UDFs, rather it is 100% within SQL Server. Additionally other new enhancements, such as the newly exposed object model, seemingly paved the way for new and exciting future development.

However, all of that abruptly changed. Deeply buried inside the readme file for the July CTP of Katmai, Microsoft quietly announced a departure from the normal feature depreciation plan. The readme stated that Notifications Services would no longer be included in the product. The following is an excerpt from that ReadMe file.