Where ‘ya been dude?

Hi all. Not much blogging out of me lately. I’ve been on vacation and, in between, I’ve been teaching SQL Server 2005 at Microsoft Sydney to some of Australia and New Zealand’s finest, including Russell Darroch, Greg Low, Chris Hewitt and Brent Challis. During the class Greg worked up his all-encompasing trigger to prevent cataloging objects in the master database. Probably partially inspired by seeing my do this a few times by mistake in demos. Some other folks in the class worked on *their* application specific features inspired by the encryption built-ins (e.g. encryptbykey), XQuery functionality, FOR XML PATH, and Service Broker. Thanks folks, I had a great time.

More people answer the question “what’s the feature you most want to hear about?” asking about Service Broker each class. It’s amazing to see Broker’s “recognition curve” increase steadily since I started teaching SQL Server 2005 in…uh…August 2003. And to watch momentum building for this release in general.

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard that there’s a new CTP (Commnunity Technology Preview) released this week. I’ve got the CTPNotes file. Be SURE to read this one carefully. There’s a lot of new stuff in this build. I’ll be home mid-week to start on it in earnest.

Right now I’m just back from watching the sun go down at Manly Beach. Morning was spent navigating the waves and getting myself sunburnt, then it started sprinkling rain around 3. Cleared up right after dinner. It’s going to be hard to leave summer.. oh that’s right.. its autumn here already.

More technical content shortly. Got some blog comment responses to catch up on too…later.