General
General
There was me thinking I was going to be all cool and be the first one to post my first day impressions and I see about 5 people ahead of me, sigh need to be faster tomorrow.
Today has had its glitches but is working out good so far.
Started on the 9:30 flight from Seattle direct to San Diego, all looked good as we drove up to the airport drive then I went inside and the Alaska desk was the longest line I have every seen at Seatac, pretty much everyone had a laptop bag and various pieces of teched conference warrior clothing, bags, hats, pens, etc etc. Bumped into several folks I knew in the line including Sean Boon from the BI Practices Team. Then I when I was in line for the plane I bumped into Keith Short from the Whitehorse team, I hadn't seen keith for ages and we had a joint analyst briefing a couple of weeks ago and here we were on the plane. There were a LOT of laptops on the plane but one kind Softy decided the Flight Attendants were overworked and so starting helping them push the drinks trolley and serving coffee etc. The FAs thought it was so funny they took his picture!
On arrival in San Diego I bumped into Mahesh from my team and his wife(who also works at MS) and we were going to catch a cab to the Hyatt but somehow my luggage got lost. So instead I headed off to the Whidbey Design review that was being held with some journalists. There were some folks from the UK(MS and Journos there) that I wanted to touch base with, for the journos it was the close the loop from TechEd Europe last year when I told them to come to PDC and Tech Ed US to get the answers to their questions that I was not allowed to tell them. Looks like they got all the answers they needed andnow they have some new questions, good job I am not going to TechEd Europe this year to feel the pain :-)
There was a SQL Server session at the end of the design review so instead of doing slides Tom Rizzo and I just demo'd for 45 mins, the attendees had been in powerpoint hell for 2 days so we thought to spice it up a bit, I think we got them going a little bit.
After that we walked(the long way) back to the conference centre, Corey Thomas(from SQL Server Product Management) and I went to register while Tom went to prep for demo hell on Tuesday. We bumped into Arul from our setup team and Mike Rys. After a quick trip to the speaker room to check it out(its a LONG way from anywhere, looks like they are really trying to get the speakers to not hang out there) time to head back to the hotel, where I bumped into Kim Tripp, Roger Wolter and Stephen Wynkoop.
My luck was back in my corner when I checked in, my luggage was waiting for me! And after a quick snack I am now nose back to the grind stone! I just finished my traditional investigation of the conference bag, there was more stuff I wanted to keep this year(primarily because of info content) then is normal, not sure about the bag itself yet.
I thought today was supposed to be the easy day? Looking fwd to SteveB in the morning and the Dev General session on Tuesday I think it is, lots of VERY cool Whidbey stuff that we have not yet talked about.
Right back to real work, I am trying to fix a bug in my ASP.Net demo for Thursday, its pretty much hosed at this point so I need to focus.
(Trying to make up for not posting for a while by posting on mass! That and I was getting my ass kicked online in BHD tonight so this seems more relaxing)
We had the speaker kick off for Tech Ed today, normally they hold it on the Red West Campus which is a pain to get to from the main campus, but this year it was in the St Andrews Cafe, which is the one that SQL Server and Exchange share, so it was an easy walk!
The great news is that TechEd is sold out, normally this happens closer to the start of the event but it was sold out last week so it should be a blast, this will be my 5th Tech Ed of some form(TechEd US or TechEd Europe, sometimes I do both) in 5 years at Microsoft. Orlando was my fav as it was huge, the party night was a blast ( we hired Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure for the evening!), the only bad thing about Orlando was the fact that the conference was so big it took more than 20 mins to walk from the speaker area to the session rooms, my knees were killing my by the end of the conference. I found some pictures from the conference and posted them here: http://groups.msn.com/EuanGarden/techedswork.msnw
We have a huge community focus this year, every year we try to do the Ask The Experts differently to try and make it better, ATE is one of the primary reasons I love TechEd, the questions always amaze me and being able to get insight into the problems/areas of concern for customers is always very insightful.
This year we are not doing a formal ATE, we are going to have a series of Cabanas which are open throughout the conference, there is a schedule and there are 4/5 members of the dev team staffing the cabana at all times, you can come to the cabana and come and see when speakers like Mike Rys, Myself and others are in the Cabana and them come back and ask questions. You can also schedule a 15 min meeting with any of the speakers via a tool called RIO. Feel free to book time with me to talk about Yukon, tools, SQL2000, the weather or the parties :-)
I was looking at my schedule for the conference and it is starting to look a little manic, here is what I am up to so far:
Sunday: Leave Seattle, Arrive San Diego at lunchtime, head straight to a meeting with our Regional Directors. Then checkin, register and pick up my lovely new MS Event shirt. After that we have a Cabana meeting to make sure we all know what we are doing :-)
Monday: SteveBs keynote, I know a couple of things he is talking about, it should be fun, Steve is such a high energy speaker I think I will hide at the back. I am in the Cabana from 12-2. Then Tom Keane from the MOM team and I have a session on MOM and SQL Server, Toms a great speaker and in reality he is going to do the session and I'll be there to answer questions on futures and Yukon. In the evening is our Exhibit Halls Reception
Tuesday: Andy Lees keynote, he's british so its bound to be good :-) and we have some sql server content in there so I'll eb paying attention. I also have my speaker coach meeting in the morning( we use an awesome speaking coach at Microsoft, he is somewhat aggresive in his nature but amazingly effective), despite having spoken for 5 years at TechEd and various MS conferences, plus having spoken before coming to MS, its always worth getting a top up from Richard. In the afternoon I have another Cabana session and then in the evening our PR firm has arranged a dinner with some of our customers.
Wednesday: I'm in the cabana in the afternoon and then there are some events in the evening, not sure which one I'll be at yet but the management technologies one at San Diego zoo sounds like fun.
Thursday: I have a SQL Server 2005 Management Tools overview session in the morning and then cabana in the afternoon, followed by the conference party in the evening at Sea World.
Friday: Get on the plane back to Seattle for a rest!
Quite a week, See Ya there!
I've been in hardware heaven recently so I thought I'd share my new toys with you.
My desktop machine at home had been getting a little scary, making strange noises, not booting, overheating etc, its 18 months old and it was a self build job which I was never 100% happy with, nor could I (or the local PC shop) ever truly run the glitches out. I use my home machine for a wide variety of tasks; surfing, home finances etc but its really heavily used for Photo/Video work, gaming(current game of choice is a beta of Novalogic's Joint Operations Typhoon Rising, http://www.jointopsthegame.com its a little buggy but great fun for a beta) and fun dev work that I try and do via Virtual PC (more on this later).
It was really struggling to run some of the new games( Call of Duty, Lock On etc) and it was just not fun to develop on it. At home I have switched to using VMWare and recently Virtual PC so I don't pollute my fun machine with a bunch of webservices and asp.net sites, these are great technologies but they live and die by hard disk perf and memory.
So I started looking around at doing another home build and maybe getting all trendy by using a shuttle, one of my peers built an entire home digital entertainment network using 3 of these and swears by them. But the thought of having my large fingers fight there way through the inside of the case did not appeal. I was browsing Dells web site one night and they had a bunch of special offers and when I compared the specs and cost it was effective to get the new machine from them. Here is what I got; http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/dimen_xps?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs this is their gaming special and I did some upgrades, so it has 1x P4 EE 3.2GHz, 2x 10,000RPM 72GB SATA Drives, 1x 7,200 250GB SATA Drive, 2GB of RAM, CD-RW, DVD-RW, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and a 20” LCD Monitor.
Its proving to be an outstanding machine for gaming and dev work, I can give my VPC images 1.5GB ram and run them off the faster SATA drives, VS really flies! For gaming the only slight flaw is that despite the fact I chose a monitor with a 16ms response time, which is fast for an LCD, its still not quite fast enough for FPS games. Hopefully its going to last me for a while :-)
The other new machine I just got was a new laptop at work. My current laptop has been slowly dying, its a Toshiba Tecra 9000 with 1GB of RAM and a 1.3 P3M. But the HD is really slow and the battery life is very limited. Its pretty common for me to come into MS in the morning at 9/10 and then be in meetings for the entire day, frequently away from my building. So I have been trying to find a solution to keeping up on mail without having to carry a laptop bag with power supplies etc. Up until now I have been using a Toshiba Wireless PDA with a long life battery, but reading attachments is more than a little challenging and writing lengthy responses is a time consuming business.
My current machine was due for replacement in January but nothing that we had available on our internal hardware centre really offered much over the current laptop, the tablets looked cool but didn't have the power that I really wanted (my demo laptop needs to be able to run a couple of instances of SQL Server, Analysis Services, Reporting Services, VS and sometimes MOM) and I am not a fan of the huge multimedia laptops with limited battery life. Then Toshiba brought out the new M200 tablets and a few of the folks in my team got them and were very happy, but as folks who have seen me write on a whitebaord will tell you I can barely read my own handwriting these days so the chances of a machine doing it are pretty slim, but the tablet form factor did appeal. I was all set to order one and then our admin Leah saved me at the last minute as Toshiba brought out a new M2 http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/pc/pc_cf_prodChassis.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@1409722358.1082099015@@@@&BV_EngineID=cccdadclfdegfficgfkceghdgngdglj.0&comm=ST&pfam=Tecra&pmod=M2 model that was not a tablet but had everything else I needed. So I have been using it for the last couple of weeks and so far I am very happy. Its got a 1.7G Centrino chipset, 2GB of RAM, 60GB 7,000 RPM HD and a 10.5 hr battery life with the extended battery! More than enough power to run my VPC demos and also battery life to keep me busy on campus.
Back to more mundane issues next time, maybe some Yukon or a little WinFS.
I first started reading blogs a few months ago when I heard that they were setting them up for folks in the SQL Dev team, here on SQLJunkies.
I added blog reading to a habit I have had for years at MS which is my daily digests. First thing in the morning there are 4/5 web sites I tend to read before really getting stuck into work, these are mostly IT related sites but some(like http://news.bbc.co.uk) are more for general information. I then do the same again at the end of the day, where there is another list of sites to go visit. I added several key blogs to this daily digest but the number of blogs has gone up over time so that I struggle to remember them all and check them for new content. I mostly follow normal bloggers and struggle to keep up, I have no idea how anyone manages to keep up with Scoble(http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/).
Years ago I got very excited by the concept of Active Desktop in IE 4 and Channels as pushing is vary more efficient then me going out and remembering URLs to query, when channels died I death I always intended to write something that would go out and look at my favourite websites every morning and send me the diffs, I got about half of it written before coming to MS and never finished it. However while reading all these blogs I started digging into RSS, ATOM etc and this seemed like a good solution to my inability to keep up with blogs.
This week I finally decided to go get myself an RSS aggregator and try it out, based on the advice of some folks at MS I am currently trying out SharpReader (http://www.sharpreader.net) and its working pretty good so far, I am certainly managing to read more and keep up better than before, I highly recommend trying one.
Here are some of the blogs I am currently looking at:
http://www.simplegeek.com, this is Chris Anderson an Architect from the Avalon team who is reasonably prolofic about all things, his tech stuff is excellent but the rest is always worth a read, I've met Chris a few times and he is always entertaining!
http://weblogs.asp.net/brada, Brad is one of the key thinkers for the .Net Frameworks Design team and also the WinFX team in Longhorn, its usually easier to read Brads blog than try and get time with him to answer questions internally. I was on course with him a few weeks ago and he was answering blog questions in the breaks on what was a pretty intense class. All I made time for was the food as it was excellent but he was very comitted indeed!
http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/dbox, Don is entertaining in too many dimensions to list here but its always a good read no matter what the topic.
http://www.sellsbrothers.com/news, Chris Sells is part of the crowd of folks working on Longhorn evangelism, he was a real .Net fan before coming to MS and continues even more now, I've got a couple of his books and they are excellent.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com, I read Joel before there was blogging, if you are involved in software development his stuff is a great read, not that I always agree with him, but he always makes me think.
http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley, I don't know Chris but he provides great insight into Software Development at MS, I wish I had read his Program Management definition before interviewing at MS, would have made things a lot clearer. His final sentence on being a PM resonates with my family, a vacation is somewhere you go where you do not have to make decisions!
http://weblogs.asp.net/rick_schaut, Rick is another with great insight into working at MS, I highly recommend reading the Mac Word 6 article, very educational.
It should come as no surprises that there are a fair number of computer gamers in the SQL Server team, the conference rooms in our building have been heavily leveraged for Halo and a variety of other games. Personally I am a Novalogic Delta Force fan, especially BlackHawk Down. However we were lucky enough this week to get a delivery into the company store of a bunch of the new Microsoft Studios Xbox games. So I snagged several, thinking I wouldn't really get into them but they might form a mild distraction from BHD.
Top Spin really has me impressed and I am having great fun playing it, however imagine my surprise the other night when I am playing my way up the rankings and I have to play someone with the same name as one of the Dev Leads from the SQL Server Engine Team! Wow that has to be some coincidence right? 2 Rounds later and I am playing another member of the Engine team! So now I am curious and I start looking through all of the players in the game and I recognise a lot of the names.
At Microsoft we have a single database of names we can use in sample code and products etc, it has to be cleared by legal and we need to make sure that we don't have any famous people's names in there by accident etc. Our samples folks are always struggling for names that sound real and don't break any rules so when we started work on the new Adventure Works sample database for Yukon all the members of the dev team were asked if they would to be in the database, and a ton of folks signed the paperwork. Looks like the Top Spin folks must have been looking for names just after we were all added and hence the cluster of SQL folks.
So go out and get a copy of Top Spin and see how many folks you can recognise, several folks have been on stage or published that are listed so it shouldn't be to hard. Oh and its actually a REALLY good game, tenuous SQL Server links aside.
Ok so I failed miserably to blog from PASS, but thats a good thing as it means I was busy all week. This is my 5th PASS(including one in Europe) and I think it was the best one yet, it was certainly the busiest. Lots of things contributed to that, I think it was very well organised this year, I think the content seemed of a great quality, we had a ton of folks from the dev team and we had lots of “stuff” going on, with ask the experts, labs, pre-cons etc it was an action packed week. Oh and I almost forgot, the food was more to my tastes than last year so that clinches it :-)
Here is what I got up t
Monday: Michael Raheem, Rob Walters and I did a Pre Conf Tutorial on some of the new tools in Yukon, we added a bunch of new demos from the internal and NDA conferences including a 2 day old build of the new dbMaint that was very cool. We also dropped our JonnySQL theme for the session this time and just tried to have as many demos as possible, it seemed to go well but there was not much feedback so feel free to comment here. I have to say my favourite demo was Robs new SQLCMD demo, which is sad given all the cool UI stuff we showed but hey its a DBA tool. We did Q&A for almost 40 mins afterwards that was fun and challenging, I don't remember us getting stumped on anything but it probably did happen.
In the afternoon I went to an MVP feedback session with a bunch of other folks from SQLDev, the MVPS got to ask us a bunch of questions about Yukon and we got to ask them implementation questions, it was fun but not as dynamic as some we have had.
Tuesday: The big event for us was an all day meeting with some of our top customers, we got to talk abut Yukon and also a bunch of other topics like marketing etc. In the afternoon we had a series of “stump the chump” panels, I took part in the one on Enterprise Data Management that was run by David Campbell. It was a great 90 mins, I wish we had more time. I ended up with the 3 questions, 2 of them tough ones, one was about doing web admin for SQL Server the other was around SQLMail and its replacement in Yukon, I think Dave judged harshly that I was actually stumped on either and handed out T-Shirts to the questioners but it saves us taking the shirts home :-)
Wednesday: The big thing here was Gords keynote which was all about Yukon and the new Best Practices Analyser, I thought Tom Rizzo did a great job on the demos along with Christian and Donald. Donalds million rows in 60secs demo was very slick and just touched the surface of what DTS can do in Yukon. Think of DTS in Yukon as an Iceberg, all of the really fun and cool stuff is really just below the waterline of any demo!
I got to help out in the stampede that followed the opening of the exhibit hall to dish out Yukon Beta 1 and Reporting Services Beta 2 CD's, it was scary to be near the edge of the melee for the cds!
We also had an ask the experts lunch that was very busy and had some really tough questions to be asked and I flitted back and forth between there and the booth to help do demos etc.
In the evening we had the reception and more ask the experts, at about 7 that night Tom Rizzo, Bill Baker and I decided to try and add a new demo to Bills keynote the following morning, whoever thinks that keynotes are done months in advance should come sit backstage sometime to see how late we really leave it sometimes.
Thursday: I set a record in the morning, for the first time in 4 years I actually made it to the MVP/ Product Group breakfast, apparently this caused shock but no Awe as I am not a morning person And Steve the SQL MVP Co-ord always arranges these for 7 in the morning. Last year I had a hotel at the conference centre and still didn't make it!
The keynote was a mixed bag this morning, Alan Griver showed off SQLCLR in Yukon using DOS EDIT as his editor, he also showed some of the new database development features of Whidbey. Then Bill Baker broke his own keynote rule of not doing any demos himself by doing almost the entire demo of Reporting Services. The best part of the keynotes was that we managed to get Leah our Group Admin to the conference and almost on stage, to help. Leah is the most important person in our group as she really runs it, don't let anyone at MS tell you they run anything unless they are an admin!
The demo that we added at the last minute almost went wrong as SQL Workbench hung when we were trying to show the new Dynamic Management Views in Yukon and a quick appshutdown and restart got us going again.
Again we had an experts session over lunch with another load of really good questions and then I had session on the Yukon tools. Normally I do all the demos myself as it just makes the mechanics of the session a little easier, this time I invited anyone from the team that wanted to demo the stuff they worked on, to demo it, I also made them wear our hideous Lime Green Hawaiin “Yukon Do It“ shirts but thats another issue. The session seemed to go fine and the folks from the team really enjoyed getting on stage and showing off. Not sure how we are going to do it next year with PASS being in Orlando but we solve that when we come to it
In the evening there was a ask PSS and MVP panel so I came to heckle Bob Ward, Bart Duncan and some of the other SQL Engineers I know, somehow I ended up answering some questions which was not the plan at all but it was fun anyway.
Friday: I went to series of sessions and helped out in the labs on Friday it was all pretty tiring and a great ending to the week none the less.
Of course it is impossible above to remember and discuss all the side conversations that I had with a bunch of folks who stopped and chatted during the conference but I hope everyone had fun and see you next year!
Yep you read it right!
Donald Farmer, Matt Nunn and I (all from the SQL Server Team) are currently attending Borlands Developer conference in San Jose: http://info.borland.com/conf2003/
Microsoft is a platinum sponser of the conference and SQL Server is helping as part of that we have been manning the booth and showing Reporting Services and Yukon on the SQL Server stand, plus we have Longhorn and Whidbey on the other machines.
Yesterday I had a session where I showed a bunch of tips and trips for working with SQL Server and MSDE from Delphi. We also had a keynote from David Treadwell, who is the General Manager for .Net Platform, it included a couple of very cool demos from PDC. Demo 1 was some of the new features in ASP.net 2.0 from Rob Howard (who must have been drinking JOLT before be bounced out onto stage), Demo 2 was of Longhorn and in particular the Avalon presentation layer and WinFS storage layer, the crowd seemed to like it.
Last night the SQL Server team sponsored the Delphi 8/for .Net launch party, it was the perfect party in my mind, computer geeks let loose in a room full of champagne, ice cream(with some great toppings) and cake :-)
Today Donald showed a bunch of BI Yukon stuff including DTS and Analysis Services, he even showed how to build custom tasks using Delphi for .Net, very cool session.
Tomorrow I will have to try and top that by showing how to write SQLCLR code, XQuery, ADO.Net V2 and Service Broker examples, looks like a late night ahead!
Ok bye for now from the Microsoft Booth at Borcon, hopefully I'll get a chance to do some more blogging before PASS next week, if not I can blog live at PASS as I only have the one session (so far) on Yukon this year.
Someone pointed out it would probably be a good idea to give you all some history so you know what sorts of weird people we hire into the SQL Server team. Pretty sure I am not typical but here goes.
I've been with the SQL Server Team(and Microsoft) 4 1/2 years, I live close to the main Microsoft Campus in Redmond and I moved here from Aberdeen in Scotland.
I joined the team as the Program Manager for DTS and worked on DTS for most of SQL 2000, towards the end I became the Group Program Manager for the tools team(DTS is now a seperate team, in those days it was part of the wider tools team) and then a couple of years ago I became the PUM for the tools team.
Prior to joining Microsoft I was a Development Manager working at a UK based startup on Database Design and Management Tools. I have a BSc in Computer Science from The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen(http://www.scms.rgu.ac.uk/). In previous lives to this one I was a trainee pilot in the Royal Air Force and a Captain in the Territorial Army(UK version of the National Guard).
Oh and if you want to be really scared then you can go look at http://groups.msn.com/euangarden/welcome.msnw, this is a bunch of photos including one of me test firing an ejector seat!
-Euan
PS I promise some real SQL Server content for the next posting
Well thanks to the folks at SQLJunkies its time to try out this blogging thing.
My name is Euan Garden, I am a Product Unit Manager with Microsoft's SQL Server dev team in Redmond. There are going to be several different themes behind this blog(if I find time to write them all):
General: Stuff like this, personal musings and observations.
Microsoft: General stuff about what we are doing at MS and MS Products.
PDC: I'm going to be at PDC to work the booth etc and also speak at a user group meeting.
SQL Server: Hopefully I can add some info on this
Yukon: As long as the marketing folks don't strangle me I want to provide regular updates on Yukon, based primarily around the 3 sessions that we presented at different TechEds this year.
See you again soon.
-Euan