Thinking ahead to the SQLPass conference and also back a few weeks to the Ascend Airlift. Almost forgot that at the airlift I met Angel Saenz-Badillos for the first time in person. He introduced himself at an Ask the Experts session; I was doing the asking. He’s been writing about ADO.NET 2.0 and gave me a lead on a transaction investigation project he was doing. It’s on my “long list” but hasn’t made it to the short list yet. I was reminded because he’s on my Blogroll to the right. Check out his blog.
Interesting how you “converse” with folks on newsgroups for years without actually meeting the person you’re conversing with. I’d met up with Angel years ago on microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.adonet; we were both answering questions on all things ADO.NET, but seemed to be the only ones answering Oracle questions. He was supporting the Microsoft OracleClient provider, I was trying them all (ODP.NET, OracleClient, and DataDirect.NET Oracle) and answering folks’ questions. Now we’re both working on SQL Server 2005 and crossing paths again. This time around .NET is used in the server as well as on the client. It was good to be able to say hi for real.