At the airlift

I’m at the Ascend program launch this week; it’s being launched as part of a larger event. Yes, I finally got to meet Roger Doherty. I’m doing a day-long (actually a very long day-long) presentation of SQL Server 2005 new features for developers tomorrow. Today, I’m listening to Larry Chesnut speak about “DBA and scalability topics” as I write this. It’s interesting to see what people consider “DBA topics” as opposed to “developer topics”, because in the SQL Server culture, many small shop developers are also their own DBA. In addition, SQL Server runs some of the world’s largest installtions.


It’s also interesting that I’ve met up with quite a few folks here who took my class in beta 1 timeframe. They’re not coming for the most part because they’ve “already seen it”. If you look back at the blog entry for my “20 favorite beta 2 features” about a month ago, there’s many new features even since beta 1. So I have at least 25 new things to talk about; the list of 20 were only favorites and I’ve “found” more since then.


I’ve also been asked here if our book “First Look at SQL Server for Developers” is based on beta2/.NET 2.0 beta 1 or the earlier Yukon beta1. The answer is Beta2 with qualifications. There’s a lead time in publishing and we wanted the book to ship with the beta. So we took the information that we could get, did experiments intermediate versions and wrote what we thought would be in beta2 at the time. The server folks were pretty settled by that point, but there may be little nuances since that I’ve found through experimentation. The client-side folks made some big changes since we declared done, we caught as many of them as we could. That said, I’m keeping up to date with the latest on the book’s website. It’s difficult to write “in depth” book as the product’s changing. I was inspired by Eric Gunnerson’s excellent C# book, which shipped early but followed the product as it evovled via the book’s website.

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