Microsoft
Microsoft
As I
discussed we did a tour of the
SQL Server Building for Channel9 a couple of weeks ago, the first video is posted with more to come.
As (un)planned I was up late last night working on a new part of the demo for today, as such I slept in (missing 2 alarm calls, ooops) and missed Borlands keynote, lots of the bloggers I posted yesterday were there though if you want to see the notes.
Met up with everyone for the key note at 10, which left us 90 mins to get setup and tested, had to reboot my laptop a couple of times which was making me nervious but it seemed fine. We rehearsed the new demo, but we forgot to tell Rick we were doing it, woops.
I thought Ricks keynote went very well, he got through a lot in an hour, the first demo that Danny and I did went like this:
- Danny wrote a Delphi class that performed string splitting and manipulation, he then compiled it using the delphi for .net compiler but tagetted the 2.0 version of the frameworks using the commandline compiler instead of using the ide version.
- I then loaded the generated assembly into SQL Server and exposed the function that Danny wrote as a SQL Server function using SQLCLR.
- I then wrote a T-SQL version of the function.
- Then we ran the T-SQL and .Net versions to compare perf, the .Net version took ~100ms and the T-SQL version took ~10,000ms. There was applause from the crowd :-)
For the second demo:
- I exposed a SQL Server function as a Web Service using our new HTTP Endpoint technology.
- Danny imported the WSDL into Delphi 8 and it generated a proxy.
- Danny had a simple little UI that called the web service with a parameter and then displayed the results. Once again there was applause :-)
Post Keynote I chilled a little and did some booth duty(my those T-Shirts are flying out the door), then I went to a session on Borlands new data engine for .Net, interestingly enough they write it in a Java and then have a compiler that generates C# code, so it is 100% .Net and can run on top of Compact Frameworks. They are not shipping it yet but they hope to next year.
The first part of the evening was spent on booth duty, answering questions and doing demos, I was glad off the padded carpet by the end. Afterwards I went to the Borland Delphi meet the team session that was packed, as in standing room only, where they showed the new Diamonback Preview release, they even gave out CDx.
So now its time to start prepping for my session at 8(ouch!) in the morning, as is always the case I am adding a couple of demos at the last minute, although I did manage to get my slide count down to 52, shoulf be a snap in 75 mins...
(Catching up with actually posting my blog notes)
Arrived Sat night, it was a nice quiet flight down from Seattle, I was able to get a row to myself and an empty row in front of me so I was able to work on my slides all the way down, although it was pretty bumpy. Might have gotten a little carried away on the flight as I have 65 slides for a 1:15 session which has a ton of demos, oops.
One of my demos is for the Microsoft Keynote on Monday, I'm doing this with Borland's Danny Thorpe I managed to track him down this morning to chat through the demo(and get some help debugging the delphi code for the demo), Danny's a pretty chilled guy so we discussed some ideas for the demo and decided we will make it up partially as we go along.
I must be getting old, I went to check out the MS booth in the show hall and instead of looking to see if we have any cool demos or giveaways on the stand, I looked to see if we had paid for the same “super padded” carpet as last year :-), luckily we do so my back and knees might actually survive doing booth duty for the next 3 days. However if you are at San Jose airport on Wed night I'll be the one limping as I am bound to be in pain by then.
I bumped into Lino, Brian and others from Falafel, they have sporting theme going on their stand this year, they also have yet another venture, CodeFez. I'd swear that Lino has more subsidiaries than MS!
Seems like Nick has been having more luck with wireless than me and has been live blogging the pre-conference sessions.
After a short spell on the booth(come and get your free SQL Server 2005, B2 T-Shirt while they last!), we headed off to the Borland Keynote. This is very unlike an MS keynote, it involves the VP for Developer Relations and the CEO getting up to some antics on stage, generally involves a T-Shirt cannon and some awards for customers and partners. This year they showed a video of the next version of their Windows and .Net IDE, even with my glasses on, sitting in the 3rd row it was fuzzy so it might be time for the annual eye test! The new CTO also showed off some long term thinking they have been doing on Software Development Optimisation(SDO) it was cool to see a bunch of BI being used, including some very soothing visualisation hardware. After the session we all headed off for the welcome reception.
I headed off for the rehearsal for Rick La Plantes keynote. We ended up doing it in his hotel room, which was bigger than the meeting we had booked. This was the biggest hotel room I have ever seen in my life, it must have had more square footage than my entire house, good job Rick was only there for 20 hrs :-)
Danny and I walked through our demo for Rick, plus the Borland and MS marketing folks, everyone seemed happy so we headed out, however we came up with an idea to add to the demo so looks like a late night ahead, it will be very cool if we can do it though.
List of bloggers from borcon with far more detail than I have:
Craig Stuntz - http://blogs.teamb.com/craigstuntz
Dave Nottage - http://blogs.teamb.com/davenottage/category/138.aspx
Jim McKeeth - http://www.bsdg.org/
Joe White - http://excastle.com/blog/
Marco Cantu - http://www.marcocantu.com/Development/borcon2004/
Nick Hodges - http://www.lemanix.com/nick/
Paul Gustavson - http://www.simventions.com/gustavson/
Robert Love - http://peakxml.com/
Serge Dosyukov - http://borcon2004.blogspot.com/
Plus the annual tradition of Dr Bobs conference report
I am a little behind on my Channel9 video watching but I found time this week to watch some of the new ones. There are a series of interviews with AndersH who is an architect(although he has the Distinguished Engineer title) on the C# team, he was interviewed in the new Microsoft Museum, my favourites are his history of computing, data access in C# 3.0 and influences in the design of C#.
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=10116
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=10276
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=10502
I was lucky enough to hear Anders talk about his data access vision in the post Whidbey world a few weeks ago, we have a series of internal architecture talks called ECS and Anders was speaking at one of this, luckily it was in our building so there were a lot of folks there to hear what he had to say and partake in Q&A. Michael and Dare were both there as well.
While I am excited about C# V3, it was another V3 of Anders that really got me excited about programming so that it was fun, that was Turbo Pascal V3, hopefully next gen C# will be as much fun
Like many others I had a nightmare trying to get a decent connection at the Hyatt so I barely managed to keep up with mail, today I finall got caught up on mail and RSS feeds so I am going to copy in my TechEd notes over the next couple of days.
First my amusing hotel stories, I really think we need to give the hotels and city where TechEd is being held a little more help in understanding what is coming (apart from a load of dollars). When checking into the Hyatt on Sunday night the guy checking in next to me ask the staff if they had broadband, both folks manning the counter looked blank, so I translated and asked if they had “fast internet“ and they replied yes. I pointed out that the hotel was about to become geek central for the rest of the week(the Hyatt was where most of the speakers and a bunch of MS staff were staying, plus a ton of attendees, the hotel is MUCH bigger than last time I was in San Diego) and this question was going to come up a lot, thye might want to be prepared for it.
Naturally the first thing I did on getting to my room was to unpack my laptop and check out the broadband, which was not working, after waiting for 10 mins on tech support hotline I got through and the poor engineer on the phone was all stressed because there was some conference in the hotel that was causing problems with his server. I pointed out that there was 11,000 computer geeks in town and 1500+ were staying in the one hotel there was a somewhat shocked silence on the phone! In the end he got me running but very slowly and I ended up switching to dialup instead as it was more predictable!
Day 2
Met Brian Welcker from the Reporting Services team for breakfast and we bumped into Keith Short again. We headed (the ENTIRE length of the conference centre) off to the keynote but all the Softies had to go watch in the overflow room upstairs. I thought SteveB was very focussed in his delivery but I wish we had been able to show more of Visual Studio Team Server in the demo segment as I think it has a great product but there were enough other sessions for there to be good coverage.
I then headed over to check out the Cabana, I was scheduled for later in the afternoon but hung out and answered questions for a couple of hours.
After lunch I headed to Tom Keanes excellent session on monitoring SQL Server with Microsoft Operations Manager, Tom and I were down as co-speakers but he has done the session solo before so we kept it simple and he did the session with me providing prizes for questions. There were a ton of questions after the session which was great to see. MOM is