Everyone is still recovering from the November conference weeks (reminds me of sweeps week on TV). As a "SQL guy" the conferences in the last three weeks that would interest me include: SQLPASS-US, SQL Connections, TechEd Europe, PDC, and SQLBits. Why folks insist on holding all of them in the same three week period is beyond me. I've spent last week paving virtual machines with new CTP/beta versions of almost every software product I use.
I'm sure there were some neat demos during "conference sweeps". Maybe people thought I did some in my talks. And I haven't had a chance to go through everything yet. But I wanted to write about two demos I found pretty cool.
At the PDC, talk SVR33 included Ed Katibah, Torsten Grabs and Olivier Meyer. Olivier did demos of "the spatially enabled spreadsheet" (that is, an Excel add-in that encapsulates the SQL Server spatial library plus geocoding). Torsten use StreamInsight and combined spatial functions with LINQ queries that were registered to query data in a stream as it arrived "on the fly" from (a simulation of) Microsoft's shuttle system. This was a nice outside the box example showing the synergy between two seemingly unrelated parts of the SQL Server product.
You can catch a video of it here.