TechEd 2010 Europe; Denali at TechEd

TechEd Europe 2010 ended yesterday. I thought I'd write about it when I got home, but now I'm unsure if that will happen in a timely manner. I'm waiting at the fourth different gate in Dulles for my flight home (last of three) to Portland. It's just been delayed by 3 hours, and I hope I get home before it's time for the next trip out. If I'd have just taken that direct-from-Frankfurt Luftansa flight, I'd have been home half a *day* ago. Sigh.

Well, back to TechEd. I had a great time and met up with lots of old friends. Attended the PowerShell dinner with the MVPs. Made some new friends. Spoke about some controversial topics and participated in a Denali-thon.

First talk was about the DAC (not dedicated admin connection, but data-tier application). After explaining the ultimate purpose behind it and the 5 reasons folks are afraid of it/think it sucks now…a miracle occured. These folks actually got it! Of course it helped to point out that incremental deployment was announced at SQLConnections last week (no timeframe). And DAC seems to be an obvious delivery mechanism for the new contained database in Denali.

There were two iterations of LINQ to Entities vs. Stored Procedures. The database afficianados seemed to think I was too easy on LINQ and the LINQ fans said I couldn't get object graphs with sprocs or anonymous types. Both were right, of course 😉

Finally, my favorite, on Thursday noon. We were permitted to do an overview of Denali, and, even though the talk was announced the day before, the room was packed and an angry mob gathered outside; they were short on seats. We promised to redo things at the SQL Server booth, and I actually redid most of the demos at least twice.

Kevin Ashby started off the proceedings, followed by Justin Erikson, who gen'd up a cluster, implemented HADRON, and failed it over in 15 minutes. Impressive. Ralph Kemperdick talked about FTS and Semantic Search. His favorite. Then it was my turn. I approached the podium and screwed up my best Johnny Knoxville impression: "I'm Bob Beauchemin and this is 'how many Denali programming demos can you do in 15 minutes'". I did 12, but the feedback indicated that I was speaking a bit fast at the end. Steffen Krause finished up with a walkthrough of Project Cresant, which looked impressive.

Thanks to everyone that attended. Demos of my stuff will be posted to the SQLskills website soon.

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