Seems like this blog is still getting lots of hits, especially via Google, as a reminder
http://blogs.msdn.com/euanga is where the new stuff is going, although a lot of what is here is still relevant.
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.
I am the proud owner of a shiny new official MSDN blog, you can find it
here
Luckily my alarm call actually worked this morning so I managed to make it to my session on time, no demo dramas this year(last year I had to rebuild my machine starting on the morning of my session). I managed to get through all my slides bar 3 and 1 of my demos, which I was pretty happy with. It was really a 100mph session with a ton of content, I checked out the feedback forms and most people were happy but the did complain there was not enough time. I'll try and prune it back if we do it again next year, all feedback gratefully received for next years version! The agenda is below so you can see what I covered:
- SQL Server 2005 Overview
- SQL Server Express Edition¢
- Data Access
- .Net Integration¢
- Web Services Integration¢
- T-SQL¢
- XML¢
- Security¢
- Service Broker
After my session I sat in on Donald Farmer's session on DTS and Reporting Services, Donald did his usual awesome job, including writing a report designer in Delphi for .Net. He then showed how DTS can consume RSS feeds and used Text Data Mining to decide on “interesting” articles.
I then spent lunch working on the booth and giving out the SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 resource kits which included B2, Hands on Labs, Web Casts and a bunch of other useful stuff. We finally ran out of SQL Server T-Shirts as well, but we gave out some others at the party later. I bumped into BradA as he was arriving, he was sitting in on some of the sessions as well as answering questions in the booth before he headed out to a user group meeting and doing his session at 8 on Wed morning. We obviously upset the same person to get stuck with 8am sessions!
After lunch I headed back to the hotel for a quick snooze, another conclusion that I am getting old, I can't handle the late nights(and no alchohol was involved!) at conferences any more!
This evening was the party sponsored by MS at the San Jose Tech Museum, this is the same place as last year so I managed to find the food MUCH faster than I did last year. Spent time chatting with some of the Falafels and some of the other MS folks. DavidI came over to chat for a whileand was telling us amusing stories from previous Borcons. He has been to the odd one or 2, overall it was a good night and there were more free t-shirts on the way out. Oh and if you were the guy I saw dipping twinkies in the chocolate sauce on the desert table, I really hope you get help for the carb addiction!
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
A couple of folks have reported this is a problem in the newsgroups, it is and I just posted this to .tools:
This is a known issue with WinXP SP2. A fix for this has shipped in hotfix 944 on 6/2/04. It shipped in 32-bit only originally. Any later hotfix for 32-bit or 64-bit also includes this due to the cumulative nature of our hotfixes.
We will be updating the following KB to reflect this:
BUG: SQL debugging does not work in Visual Studio .NET after you install ID: 839280
To get a hotfix you need to contact PSS.
Its that time of year, sunny San Jose beckons for Borcon. Donald Farmer and I are off in a couple of weeks time to Borlands annual conference. There are a host of softies going including BradA, don't worry Brad you'll have a blast, but not as much as we had at the Ice Cream and Cake party that SQL Server sponsored last year, though :-)
Borcon is a great opportunity for those of us in Redmond to get out and about and see a group of folks that likely are not at TechEd or the other usual conference hangouts. For me personally its my annual reminder of how to write pascal as well as chance to meet up with some long time friends such as Lino and Tex from Falafel, Brian, who is also now at Falafel and Ray.
I am going to cover the new features in ADO.Net as well as the programability features of SQL Server such as SQLCLR, XML, Http Endpoints, Broker and a host of others, Donald is going to cover DTS and Reporting Services including the new controls in SQL2005.
Come along and see if we can still remember how to write code :-)
So it looks like everyone else on Junkies got here before me! I do have an excuse I've been busy on the SQLExpress Newsgroups and blog.
I've also been working with Susan to setup a SQL Server 2005 samples Workspace on GotDotNet.com
We are looking at how to provide updated info post B2 so we are considering a blog or some other form that is broader than just the newsgroups.
All suggestions gratefully received on the feedback front.
Enjoy B2 and I look fwd to seeing the samples
Seems like these blogs have been focussed just a little on the new Express SKU's, oh well might as well follow the crowd...
Lance from the Visual Studio Data Tools Team has a great post that explains how XCopy deployment works in express, here.
Like everyone else I am super excited about SQL Server Express, we have been keeping quiet on the plans for a long time and its been frustrating:-)
One of the tools that was shown in the demo(if it went as planned) at TechEd should have been Express Manager ( XM ). This is a new lightweight query and admin tool. We are going to make it available for download sometime in August as it is lagging a little behind the rest of Yukon. XM is built in managed code and the goal is to make the download size really small, the initial version that supports query only will be a 2MB download if you have the NETFx 2.0 and SMO on the machine.
XM will also work against the other SQL Server 2005 SKUs so it will be a great lightweight tool.
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
Its been a while since I blogged anything on Yukon, Christa has just posted the Data Track slide decks from TechEd so I will use one of my demos from TechEd.
SQLCMD is a key new piece of technology in Yukon its designed to replace osql but also to add a range of new functionlality. As part of the customer research for Yukon we went out and studied a bunch of customers in their environment and got to see and get copies of their scripts for doing operational management of SQL Server. From a commandline perspective many customers used a combination of osql, batch files and VB Script. When we started the design for SQLCMD we wanted to add enough batch functionality to dramatically reduce the need for batch file editing. We did this by adding SQLCMD extensions to T-SQL, these only work on the client side so these won't work in procs or in scripts you call through ADO, for this release.
Lets walk through a simple example of doing a backup, but make it more flexible than today.
BACKUP DATABASE $(db) TO DISK = "$(path)\$(db).bak"
This script backs up a database, defined by variable db, to the path defined by variable path with a name defined by variable db. Now this is a simple example of a backup but it shows how it can be parameterised. Now we have our script, how do we define the variables? There are a couple of ways, option 1 is to pass them on the comandline:
SQLCMD -ic:\dev\src\yukon\scripts\backup.sql -vdb="pubs" path="c:\data"
This will run the above script and define the needed variables. Lets take a look at the second way to declare the variables and also add some more to the script above. Consider the following SQLCMD script:
:connect demosvr\inst1
:setvar db pubs
:setvar path C:\data
:r "c:\dev\src\yukon\scripts\backup.sql"
GO
:connect demosvr\inst2
:setvar db northwind
:setvar path C:\data
:r "c:\dev\src\yukon\scripts\backup.sql"
GO
This sample connects to inst1, sets the variables then calls the backup script from above, then it does the same thing again for inst2. So this sample introduces a couple of new things, the first of which is the ability to connect to different servers inside scripts. The next is the declaration of sqlcmd variables inside sql scripts and finally we can see that the scope of those variables can cross script boundaries.
Hopefully Michiel who is the PM for SQLCMD will start blogging and then we can get some more samples as there is a ton more including some very slick XML handling. If not I will dig out some more samples.
Thanks to Borlanders Anders and Mike for the following, how cool is this and this
And if you want to be distracted then try this, my best is a paltry 1025
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 a really important product to all the MS Server Products but it is becoming a key piece of the management story for SQL Server and it will only get bigger with Yukon
Spen