For a long time I have watched with dismay as my e-mail has reported a lot of trackback and referrals to posts on my blog from places on the Internet that I would not personally visit. I have pretty much ignored the problem up until now figuring that most people who would read my blog would know that spam is a way of life on the Internet. The other day I saw a couple of comments pop up that were definitely spam, they had the same wording telling my site has blogging potential (since that is all I have done I would hope it does) and then a key word. I decided that as much as I hate to censor anything on my site I also don't need that. I went through and deleted the comments and now I am going to try to figure out a way to go back and remove all of the trackback entries. I am hoping that will help out with the signal to noise ratio on my blog and I will try to make sure I post worthwhile information.

I am not a really big fan of Formula-1 racing. Mostly because I don't have the time rather than any other reason. This article caught my eye. The quote "The Council also decided that Microsoft has won the tender to become 'official ECU supplier' for the same period." seems to me that Microsoft will be providing some software for the races. I am not really sure what an ECU is and the article doesn't elaborate. I remember a few years back a video about .NET providing statistics on race cars but I think they were more of the stock cars. I am sure that there must be a lot of trust in the software provided because at the speeds these guys travel it would be deadly to have a software malfunction.

In any case, it will be interesting to watch and see how many people bring out the old jokes about having to reboot your car.

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.