This last Tuesday, Phillip and I drove up to Denver for a Microsoft launch event. The launch event, like all the others this past month or so, premiered Visual Studio.NET 2005, SQL Server 2005, and the beta of BizTalk Server 2006. It was the first time I've been to a launch event.
It felt good to be in the presence of 3,000 to 4,000 folks who are interested in the same technology (a keynote speaker had mentioned there were 3,800 registrants). Having participated in a couple of Borland conventions, it was interesting to see this regional event was more well-attended than a Borland national event.
It was snowing that day, so we spent time in only two sessions. With snow, it can be a long drive back to Colorado Springs from Denver. Actually, rush hour always makes it a long drive back and snow makes it worse.
One session focused on SQL Server 2005's recovery solutions. The real time demo showed us how an application hitting SQL Server 2005 could remain active even though one of the filegroups was damaged or missing. Peer-to-peer replication showed well in another quick demo. I was disappointed to hear that Data Mirroring is available for testing but not production use. Data Mirroring is to be production-ready in Service Pack 1, whenever that happens to be released.
Another session covered, at a high level, some of the new architect-specific features in VS.NET 2005 as well as integration with BizTalk. It was tough to make it through this demo. One of the speakers wasn't very polished and the demo encountered problems. But it did pique my curiosity in BizTalk. A work associate had mentioned it before but I hadn't seen before what it could do. Granted, I didn't see much in this demo, but the ability to graphically define file conversions and message processing interested me.
Overall, I'm glad I attended the event. It was geared towards passing on high level information and that's what we got, as well as some free software and SWAG.
--
Sean Winstead
Tags: Microsoft, SQL Server, VS.NET