TechEd 2005 Tidbits 1
After an uneventful flight (for once no fires or hurricanes) where I had the pleasure to sit next to one of our directors for Corporate PR, I arrived in Orlando for TechEd 2005 late Saturday night. The drive from the airport to the Hotel was pretty bad: the rain poured so hard, you could hardly see 20 meters ahead of the car.
On Sunday, I got to present my TechEd presentation at the Academic TechEd Pre-conference before heading back and going to the book signing booth and the TechEd presenter and staff orientation. I got two people that made very positive comments about the XQuery from the Expert book, but nobody was interested yet in buying a book. The staff orientation was the obvious "engange and help your customers" and "don't ask 'Can I help you?', ask an apropriate open ended question instead"...
After an excellent Sushi dinner at Moonfish with Jason, Brian, Alex, Fausto and Tim, it was time to get enough sleep for the conference.
Here are some tidbits that may be of interest:
- Euan started a TechEd 2005 video diary at http://mssql.members.winisp.net/ containing short videos by the SQL Server Dev Team.
- http://techedbloggers.net/ provides an aggregation of many TechEd 2005 related weblogs.
- My talk DAT384 will be at 9am EDT on Friday. Since this will be "right" after the attendance party, I hope that all that are planning to attend it, will not party too hard :-). The talk will be followed by a Q&A session in the Cabana, where I will give away a copy of each the Xquery from the Expert and the Xquery Language book for the best questions. So be there!
- We also have vouchers for a free RTM SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition for the people stopping by the Cabanas or Exhibition Pavilion (the number of vouchers is limited).
- Currently I am sitting in the overflow room listening/watching Steve Ballmer's keynote. Interesting times - seeing Steve demo-ing MOM and Windows running on a Sun box. I am sure, Kent will post a list of highlights (since I was sitting next to him during the keynote and he was busy taking notes).
- Tomorrow, Paul Flessner, our VP, will make some interesting announcements that I expect will be blogged about for those that could not make it to TechEd (I can' tell yet :-)).
Those that are at TechEd and want to chat with me in person, can find me at the SQL Server Cabana, where I will be mostly hanging out. If you don't see me, ask the cabana host for me.