We will be holding our November UCNUG meeting tomorrow (11/19) at the NuSkin NOC building at 1175 S 350 E in Provo. I will be talking about the WCF REST Starter Kit and how it can simplify creating REST based services.

The meeting will be sponsored by Statera.

I have been doing a series of screencasts on SQL Server 2008. I noticed the other day that the first two have been posted.

Improve Performance and Storage Utilization with Data Compression covers the data compression feature and shows when and how it can help with performance and storage utilization.

Enable Transparent Data Encryption covers the transparent data encryption (TDE) feature. I really love this feature because it protects your data whenever it is written to disk. This alone could help solve a lot of problems with databases that are restored to servers that they shouldn't be or lost backup tapes.

The screencasts are designed to show how to do something from scratch so they are very focused and you get to see my (somewhat poor) typing skills as I build up SQL scripts.

I have a list of topics I am working through but I would love to hear what you find the most important or what you have questions about. If you have any topics that you would like me to cover just leave a comment here and I will see if I can get to it.

I finally got some time and installed Windows 7 on a Hyper-v virtual machine. The first thing I noticed was that it seemed to install very fast. I only allocated 1024 MB RAM for the virtual machine so I was expecting very slow responses from the graphics for setup. I didn't time it but my "gut feel" was that it was faster than installing Vista or XP into a similar configuration.

I have only played with it for a little while but over the next few weeks I intend to install some applications and see what happens. At this stage of development with Windows 7 I don't know what to expect. The disks say "pre-release preview" so I figure I am in for some crashes. I just don't know how many and how severe. As I get a chance to work with it I will post any news that I have.

While installing a driver from HP I saw the picture below. I was surprised to see a KBps rating for the software installation.

I normally associate KBps with modems and networks and not hard drives. I didn't know what to make of the number since it could mean the disk transfer rate, how much of the installation program had been written as a function of file size/time, or some other calculation. It was slightly interesting to watch but a totally useless number without some sort of context to put it into.

I am sure we have all heard or seen the joke that starts off "If Microsoft made cars..." and tells of the problems we would have with our automobiles. I saw this snippet from a news article about the new Google phone OS.

GOOGLE REPAIRS ANDROID

Google's Android OS may be small (small enough to drive the new Google phone) but it has plenty of code, it seems, for hackers to attack. Case in point: Last week, researchers showed how hackers can take over the phone by tricking the user into going to a malicious Web page. With that control, your passwords could be stolen, no matter how many obscure letters and characters they contain.
The patch is now out and requires a simple restart.

My first thought was "If Google made phones..." but then I got more serious in my  thinking process and wondered about the last line stating the phone needed a simple restart. I wondered why they needed the restart.

That got me to thinking about patching and why it is so hard. I like the idea of a modular OS with a small kernel and services that run on top of it so you only have to reboot when the kernel is updated. That should be an infrequent event. UNIX and its derivatives have always been there, Windows is getting there. I dream of the day when the OS is a bootstrapper with just a few lines of code and the kernel itself is so modular that when you have to patch it a new process can be spun up and the old processes can be allowed to "drain down"  until it is not being used any more and can be killed.

I was hoping that Windows 7 would move even closer to this ideal but from what I saw at PDC it is an evolutionary and not a revolutionary change over the kernel in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Maybe the next version of Windows will get us closer.

Many years ago I wrote an operating system and I realize it is not all that easy to do. I suspect that beyond the technical challenges, the cost to develop the OS would make it too expensive for Microsoft or another company to take on as a project. I have a hard time seeing this as an open source project. Not because it couldn't be done, but because I see it needing hardware support and I don't think Intel or AMD would change their architecture to support this without the promise of it helping to sell their products.

I may never see this OS but I can still dream.

Today was the last day of PDC. The astute reader will realize that I didn't post yesterday. The truth is that I didn't attend any sessions yesterday and only 1 today because work got in the way.

The session I attended today was about the cloud and physics. The presenter pointed out that for most users they will be facing issues like latency and bandwidth problems that don't appear in the lab. It was very thought provoking.

Another thing that was though provoking was a t-shirt I saw. On the front it said "serial killer". I am sure it was about doing parallel processing and not serial but I was wondering if the wearer were heading to the airport and if so what kind of a reception he would get from the TSA screeners there.

Now that PDC is over I am telling myself that I will spend the next few months viewing the recorded sessions and learning more. Even though that will probably not happen I have to say that I feel like I know more about what is coming and am excited to see it. We will all be busy trying to figure out how the world of the server, desktop, mobile, and cloud will work together.

The keynote today was about Windows 7. I saw a lot of things that I think will improve the average day of most Windows users. I especially liked the MRU list showing up with the icons on the task list. That will save me multiple clicks each day.

I really liked the demos of synchronizing data between different office applications. I work with a lot of remote teams and sometimes Live Meeting doesn't seem to be the best environment.

I also liked the keynote on the Azure services and moving from a local service to one hosted in the cloud. I had seen a similar demo less than a month ago at an NDA event but it was still great to see.

I went to a "lap around Oslo" session and saw some good stuff with the modeling language "M", the tool "Quadrant", and the repository.

Most of this afternoon was spent working and talking to a lot of the other RDs. For me getting to see all these smart people may be the best part of a conference like this.

You can see screencasts and get news from PDC from a variety of sources including microsoftpdc.com so I won't try to capture every detail but instead put down my thoughts on what I learned/saw.

Today has been an Azure day. In the morning keynote Microsoft announced Microsoft Azure, their new operating system for the cloud. I have spent most of the rest of the day in sessions learning more about the cloud and what all it can do now and what it will do in the future. I have some small ideas for the SQL Services storage and how to use it. I just registered for my Azure account so I can test out the CTP.

One of the useful and impressive demos I saw was of a workflow that started out as a local WF workflow and then sent messages into the cloud where the workflow continued and finally messages were sent back to the originating workflow. I can envision scenarios where certain things like payroll or invoicing could be made part of the workflow and companies could reduce costs for commodity items that are not really part of their core business.

In other news the WCF REST starter kit was released on CodePlex. You can access it at http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/Wiki/View.aspx?title=WCF%20REST. There is also documentation and other information at the WCF Developer Center REST site.

Also LiveID will become an OpenID provider. It is in CTP now but if it works and gains wide spread adoption it will enable a lot more "single sign on" scenarios. This looks like the first concrete step to come out of Microsoft agreeing to support OpenID.

finally, while not PDC related, TJay Belt had an article on duties for on-call DBAs featured at SQLServerCentral.com.