B# .NET Blog

Yesterday evening was a big shot actually at TechEd 2005 Europe. A bunch of people came across to see the Exhibition Hall with the revamped ATE area and the brand new Community Lounge. I guess the “Welcome Drinks” had to do a lot with it, as there was beer (now, that doesn't attract me at all as I am a 0.000% alcoholic guy :-d). And of course a lot of people were doing the usual gadget hunting (and there are many of those gadgets, yet another reason to come to TechEd ;-)). Now, I have to be honest and say that I'm guilty too, but when you're dealing this stuff you should at least know what it is (yeah right, Smetje always has an explanation, does he?).

Now, switching to today's schedule: it's very very busy actually. First I attended a couple of session on database technology, including the use of SQL Server Integration Services and SQL Server Analysis Services (“SQL Server 2005 End to End: Integrate, Analyze and Act“) by Euan Garden and Donald Farmer (hmm, these to surnames do have some match). Really amazing and super powerful stuff (data mining, cubes, reporting, integration of other data sources such as Excel, perform analysis on gathered data, etc). Afterwards I attended the session on “SQLCLR vs. T-SQL: Best Practices for Development in the Database” by Gert Drapers. This was a level 400 session but in my very opinion it was very well-explained and it covered exactly the stuff it needed to cover.

Now I'm off to find some food and then I'll be on the ATE booth 15b for Virtual Server again starting from 2PM on. The ideal place to relax (:o) to prepare for two parties coming up tonight. the Belgian Country Drink and the SQL Server 2005 party both downtown in Amsterdam somewhere.