I am about to head out to the airport so this is the end of another TechEd. I have attended a few sessions over the last 2 days but I didn't take really good notes so rather than bore you with the scanty details :)

Today most of the buzz has been about the anouncement last night from Bill Gates that he will be transitioning out of his day to day work in the next two years. I think it is great that he will be able to spend more time working on his charities and trying to help humanity. I hope to find myself in a similar situation some day but to be realistic I will probably end up doing that around the time I retire. It also seems to make some more sense as to why Ray Ozzie was the keynote here.

One of the biggest pain points of this conference has been the transportation. I am not sure what the problem is but there is a labor dispute with the bus drivers and their company that has caused some problems. To be fair to the replacement drivers I think they have done a better job than the "regular" drivers. On Sunday night coming back from the keynote the bus driver asked if anyone was local so they could tell him where to go rather than reading the route sheet. Nobody volunteered so we headed out. After getting on the freeway and passing Fenway Park (which we hadn't come close to on the way over to the convention center) people started giving him directions. He eventually got us back to the hotel but I was wondering for a while. This morning I think I finally took the same route for a second time. I have see a lot more of Boston than I thought I would because it seems that each day we take a different route to the convention center.

I look forward to seeing all my friends at the next conference.

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.

This year the first day of TechEd was the keynote on Sunday evening. I have to say that I was pretty unimpressed with the keynote. To be fair I got there late but it didn't seem to have any really big announcements and the actress they had as the "tallent" is from a show that I don't watch.

My biggest complaint with the keynote was the lack of Bill or Steve. I understand that they may not want to spend their lives traveling but where is the love for us developers?

On Monday I spoke in the learning center at a "Chalk Talk" on SQL Server Worst Practices. It was very well attended and I enjoyed the ability to have a little bit of interaction with the people in the audience. I also got some time to work in the SQL Server booth and talk with some of the attendees.

I spent most of the rest of the day in meetings with Microsoft people. They are all under NDA so I won't spill any secrets here but I will say that they were very productive.

I did attend Hoe Homnick's session on programming SQL Server 2005. I learned about linking a certificate from an assembly to a user login to allow unsafe access to a .NET assembly without setting trustworth on for the database. I have just been lazy and didn't bother to look it up but it was relatively simple.

Yesterday there was an article on Yahoo! News about Windows Server 2003 being more reliable than Linux. There is a lot of discussion about this particular article on Slashdot. Although a lot of the discussion centers around the author and whether she is unbiased or not there were some good points. For instance the quote from the article

"Windows 2003 Server, in fact, led the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20 percent more annual uptime."

has a lot of people up in arms. It is not really clear what the statistic is supposed to mean. I suppose it is possible that for every minute that Windows is down a Linux box could be down for a few seconds longer, but does it really mean anything to the users? The problem that I see with a 20% statistic is that it is meaningless without some kind of context. The numbers quoted in the article don't seem to make sense to me so here is my example of why I think the percentage number might sell newspapers but it doesn't help make decisions.

Using the 20% more downtime as a basis for the calculation I came up with the following statistics. If the Windows server is down for 2 minutes then the Linux server would be down for 2 minutes 48 seconds. Not really that big of a deal and not really noticeable to the average end user. As the amount of down time for a system goes down the 20% becomes less and less of an issue.

I think the main takeaway from the article should be the following quote:

On a broader note, said Yankee analyst Laura DiDio, the major server operating systems all have a "high degree of reliability," and have showed marked improvement in the last 3 to 5 years.

As long as we are heading in the right direction the competition between Windows and Linux will help all of us to have better, more reliable products. That seems like a win-win situation to me.

I have gotten a few e-mails and an article on a rumor (even though there is a Microsoft press release to this effect it is still a rumor) that Adobe will sue Microsoft over the inclusion of the "Save As PDF" feature in Office 2007. Although the details are fairly sketchy it appears that Microsoft expects they will be sued if they include the functionality or give it away for free. The articles I have seen only mention the ability to save a document as a PDF. While Adobe sells something to do this so including it would cut their revenue I can't see this as the only issue since other word processing programs include the ability to save as a PDF. The format is open and although I am not a lawyer it appears that anyone can use the standard to create PDF documents. Even if the sticking point is that Microsoft sells office and therefore gets money from PDF it doesn't seem to hold when you realize that Word Perfect also costs money and allows you to save to a PDF. I think there is something deeper going on here.

I don't understand the problem since the PDF format is well documented and any number of people have created printer drivers or components for creating PDF documents. I support Adobe's ability to make money off of their standard but it seems to me that if the whole problem is over the ability to save as PDF without charging a license fee then Adobe needs to be fair and charge everyone the same amount. That means Microsoft, Corel, and anyone writing a component to save to PDF would pay the same amount for licensing. If not then someone shoud be suing Adobe for unfair business practices.

Whatever happens I hope that Microsoft and Adobe come to some reasonable agreement. I already have to go out and download Acrobat reader when I set up a new machine because a lot of the documents I get are in PDF format. I would hate to have to get another download to be able to create them, and yet another download to be able to index them in SharePoint and yet another download to be able to .... (you get the idea)

I just read in my e-mail that Microsoft has announced a new product in the Visual Studio Team System product line for databases. I sat in on a design meeting for this product last year and saw it demonstrated in a webcast about 3 weeks ago. I can hardly wait to get my hands on this tool as I am sure it will make designing and modifying databases much easier.

Here is the relevant content from the e-mail.

This morning (09:00 PST, Wednesday May 31 st 2006) the Visual Studio Team System team announced the availability of a brand product in the Team System family.

Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals delivers a market-shifting database development product designed to manage database change, improve software quality through database testing and bring the benefits of Visual Studio Team System and life cycle development to the database professional. It delivers on Microsoft’s commitment to provide tools that reduce communication barriers and complexity across software development teams and fulfils increasing demand in the market for more advanced database change management tools. Database professionals such as database architects, database developers and database administrators, can now employ integrated change management functionality to streamline changes to their databases, ensure quality, and speed deployment.

Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals includes a number of great new features:

·          A new Visual Studio Database Project allows you to import your database schema and place it under source control. When the time comes to deploy schema changes the new project system allows you to quickly build update scripts or packages and then provides a mechanism to deploy them to the database of our choice.

·          Rename Refactoring allows you to easily rename any object in your database and be assured that all references to that object will be renamed to correspond to the change

·        A New T-SQL Editor allows you to be more productive when writingT-SQL code from within Visual Studio including support for parallel executionof queries and viewing of execution plans.

·        SchemaCompare allows you to quicklycompare the schema of two databases (or your source controlled project and adatabase) and script updates to bring the database schemas into sync

·        DataCompare allows you to quicklycompare two databases and script updates to bring the data in these databasesinto sync

·        The Database Unit Testing infrastructure allows you to createdatabase unit tests using T-SQL or managed code.

·        DataGenerator lets you create datageneration plans that produce repeatable sets of meaningful data based uponyour existing production databases that can be deployed to a database prior torunning unit tests thus ensuring consistent test results

You can find out more about this great new release, see screenshots and find out how to get the early community technology preview which will be available on June 11th at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/products/dbpro/default.aspx

We are making Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals part of the Visual Studio Team Suite, so you’ll get this product for free when we RTM this edition if you are a VisualStudio Team Suite subscriber through MSDN. You can learn more about how to upgrade to Visual Studio Team Suite at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/renewal/#step

Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals will also be available as a stand alone Edition in the Visual Studio Team System family. You can learn more about how to buy Visual Studio TeamSystem at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/default.aspx

The team has already started blogging.You can find out more information directly from the product team by visiting the following blogs:

http://blogs.msdn.com/gertd/

http://blogs.msdn.com/camerons

http://blogs.msdn.com/rwaymi

http://blogs.msdn.com/mattnunn

http://blogs.msdn.com/thomas_murphys_agile_db_blog

http://blogs.msdn.com/tsdatabl

You can also see what others are saying by visiting the new Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals forum at http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=725&SiteID=1

With Microsoft TechEd less than a month away I am getting a lot more mail and e-mail (mostly e-mail) from various vendors asking me to visit them. I have come to expect this and I know it will only get worse until about 2 weeks after the event when they will have figured out that if I wanted to talk to them I would have. Intermingled in the marketing e-mails are some that I acutally enjoy reading. So here are 2 of my favorites (so far):

Abstract: Credit Suisse Group is a leading global financial services company, providing clients with investment banking, private banking and asset management services worldwide. Like in most enterprises, Credit Suisse provided their developers with physical machines for development. Issues such as combination of authorization, physical delivery times and compliance-related workflows led to slow development timeframes. Their R&D group built an extremely extensible self-service virtual-machine provisioning system that enables software developers in a fraction of the time to easily, securely and rapidly provision on-demand disposable workstations, servers, and multi-tier environments. Credit Suisse will exponentially increase software developer productivity, drastically lower IT costs and ensure compliancy with continuously stringent regulatory requirements. The solution uses Windows Workflow Foundation , Windows Communication Foundation , and Virtual Server .

Speaker: Leslie Muller (Architect - Credit Suisse Global R&D)

Location: Thursday 6/15/2006 from 10:15-11:30 in Theatre 2

This one caught my eye because I have spent countless hours creating Virtual PC images to be ready for one demo or another. If I can use this same technique to cut that time down it might actually leave more time for things like blogging.

The other e-mail that I like is more along the lines of trivia:

In case anyone would like to throw an event the size of TechEd 2006, here is an idea of the quantity of food and drink that would be consumed.

-          1,250,000 pieces of "Mikes & Ikes " will be consumed over the course of a week at Tech Ed 2006

-           18,750 pounds of salad will be prepared and offered at meals

-          83,700 ice cream novelty/ fruit and yogurt bars have been ordered for this function

-          60,000 eggs will be eaten by attendees at breakfast (this is equal to 4,800 dozen cartons of eggs)

-          It will take 4 semis to transport the 150,000 bottles of water consumed on this show

-          The total amount of fruit ordered will fill 3/4 of full size tractor-trailer

-          1.6 million ounces of coffee will be poured and consumed (conservative estimate)

-          More than 50,000 pounds of carbohydrates will be consumed at Tech*Ed (Atkins who?)

-          1,500 table cloths will be used and re-set on a daily basis:   (7,500 for the week)

-          A minimum of 2,000 antacid tablets are likely to be consumed at this event

There is an article on eweek about Microsoft wanting to limit the rights that their employees have on their machines. I have been working day to day as a non-privileged user for over 2 years now. I know it definitely slows me down. I always seem to be shelling out to a command prompt that is logged in as an administrator but it has saved me from viruses.

I did have one issue with the article. It said that the machine would sometimes crash when you attempt to install something without administrator rights. I have never had a crash due to that. I have always gotten a prompt asking me to choose a login with rights or a simple messagebox telling me I didn't have the correct rights.

I am downloading the beta of Windows Vista now and I hope it is easier to run without administrator privileges. If nothing else I have read that Microsoft has implemented registry and file redirects to get around some of the problems that I see on XP.

Today marks the availability of beta versions of Office 2007 and Windows Vista. I plan on downloading them and starting to play with them in the next couple of days.

Today also marks the updates to several web sites. The asp.net site has a new look to it. I am also told that weblogs.asp.net was updated but I haven't visited the main site in a long time so I can't tell you if there is a new UI or just upgrades behind the scenes. There is a new web site at iis.net that will serve as a community center for development on IIS 7. It looks like you can download the beta and get more information there.