Well, I finally decided to take the plunge and host my own blog server. This means that I am moving this blog to a new home. I'll leave the stuff that is here, but all new posts will be at the new location: http://portal.sqltrainer.com

 

Hope to see you all at the new site.

 

 

Cameron Skinner (Product Unit  Manager for Visual Studio Team System for Database Developers) announced at PASS that the "Data Dude" product will be live on November 30. Personally I think it's ready now, but there are apparently a couple of things that they want to bake into the final release. VSTSDD is a fantastic product, and frankly I see it as a must-have for any serious database development team. I got an honorable mention in Camerons blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/camerons/archive/2006/11/16/nov-30th-is-the-date.aspx

 

 

Today was the first offical day of the PASS conference. The keynote session by Paul Flessner was pretty good, but for the most part, there was no real earth-shattering information there. I did sit through a couple of sessions, BI200M which was a good overview session on Data Mining in Excel, and then AD311M, which was a great overview of the Visual Studio Team System for Database Developers..

 

Turns out that much of the content I've created for my presentation is very much of interest to the VSTSDD guys, so we'll see how many of them show up to my session tomorrow... Tonight is the big party at the "Experience", which is Paul Allens hobby..

 

Overall this seems to be a much larger conference than past years, and people seem genuinely excited.

Well, I made it here to Seattle. (What a long flight from home, COS to Dallas, then back to Seattle...I left my house at 4am Mountain and got to the hotel at 2PM Pacific)

 

Anyway, the conference starts for me with a meeting today to discuss Microsoft Learning and how things seem to have gone downhill recently. The perception from MSL is that things are not going bad, so we'll just see how it all turns out. I've promised some people to post a synopsis of what happens during the meeting, so stay tuned...