I spent all day on Tuesday in meetings with various Microsoft product groups. Of course that is all under NDA so I can't talk about it.

On Wednesday morning I did make it to 2 sessions. The first was on the new version of Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals. They went over how to generate data and run tests against that data. The interesting feature for me was that the data generator uses a seed value that will generate the same data for that seed. You don't have to save off the database and restore it before running a test. The other interesting feature was the ability to specify a distribution of the data. It isn't in the CTP now but eventually they will have the ability to look at the statistics for an existing table and generate data with the same distribution. That will really help out to make sure the data is representative for testing purposes.

The second session I attended was on SQL Server Service Broker enhancements. It ended up feeling more like a sales pitch for something that the presenters had done. They did say there was code on gotdotnet but of course they were selling a version as well. They had some connectors for BizTalk, SharePoint, and the ability to do multi-casting of messages. I wasn't really impressed with the demos but I think it has potential.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in more meetings that I can't talk about. I will say that I am excited to see if some of the ideas that we have talked about will really come to the market and if they do how much they will change the way I do my job from day to day.