Microsoft announced that Office 2007 will be delayed and that the new target date for general availability will be early 2007 instead of October 2006. Microsoft cited beta testers and internal testing that showed they have some work left to do. I agree with Microsoft. I would rather wait a few more months and get a good, quality product than to have something slipshod in my hands today. If I want poor quality I can switch over to the beta right now. I remember WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows. When it came out it was slooooow, buggy, and didn't seem to have a really professional feel to it. It was in part due to the many problems that we experienced that my company switched over to Word. That was the last time that I really used WordPerfect. I am sure that Microsoft wants to avoid pushing a lot of customers over to OpenOffice or some other alternative.

It looks like there will be dinner and a movie (Superman) for the geek dinner tomorrow night. Here are the latest details from an e-mail I got last night.

This is to remind you about the Geek Dinner at Tucanos tomorrow and Superman afterwards. All the details are available on the DevUtah blog, http://www.devutah.com . To get tickets to the show for $5.50, you need to paypal Jordy by noon tomorrow at http://tinyurl.com/pbkvq. Hope to see you there tomorrow night! Don’t forget to RSVP on the wiki too so we have an idea of how many people are going to show up: http://www.phil801.com/devutah/index.php?title=RSVP_for_the_June_2006_Dinner

Many of you might remember the lame Intellisense support that was in SQL Server Management Studio around the beta 1 timeframe. I hoped it would get better but instead it got dropped. Well, after being in the hills camping for a week I got home and started going through all the e-mail that had accumulated. I saw an offer from Red-Gate Software. You can download a free copy of their SQL Prompt tool to provide intellisense inside query analyzer or SQL Server Management Studio. The link to the free download is http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Prompt/index.htm. It required some personal information but they say that it will not be shared so I gave it to them.

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)