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I was going through the US Tech-Ed DVD's that we got last week, anyway I came across an interesting session where Microsoft announced that they had licensed the Dundas reporting services charts and gauges for SQL Server 2008. This is great news, I haven't used the Dundas controls personally, but I've seen and heard good things about them. Its a shame they couldn't extend the licence back for 2005 users.

The new tablix control and new designer look great, lots of good things coming with SQL Server 2008, I still think my favorite is the MERGE statement, it will really make loading our data warehouses a lot easier. 

Well Tech-ed is over for another year, this year was fantastic, learnt a lot stuff that will benefit the things I'm currently working on.

I focused my time on:

BI / data mining

SQL Server

ASP.NET AJAX

Then on the WPF stuff, even though I find WPF extremely interesting, I can't justify spending valuable time on it yet, when it is unlikely that I'll be doing any serious development with it in the next 12 months.

So much was going on at Tech-ed, it was a great atmosphere.

It was unfortunate timing that my uni exams landed in the same week as tech-ed, I also elected to take an upgrade exam for the MCSD certs that I have. I haven't found out how I did in my uni exams (I'm confident) but I did pass the 70-553 upgrade exam. I've started looking at the next 70-554 exam, it doesn't look like fun. Only 2 more uni subjects to complete and I should have my masters.

I haven't had any problems using Vista, its been rock solid on all the laptops that we have. The one thing that really annoys me is the auto update. Well its not the auto update so much, see we usually sleep with two of our laptop in standby in our bedroom. However once a month, these laptops will come alive in the middle of the night and apply the updates and restart. So in the dead quiet of the night you will hear the sound of Vista starting up (it wakes you up in fright, I must say). Worse still, because the laptop lid is closed, the computer will sit at the login prompt until is is due to power down (which was up to an hour). Being cold and lazy I really couldn't be bothered getting up to open and close the lid, also both laptops never seem to update on the same night, so this past week I've been woken up twice by the sound of booting laptops.

Macpomme left a comment about how the family.show application would make a fantastic web sharing application. Well it turns out this has already been created, its called Geni. Jeff Attwood at codinghorror.com has also spoken about this application for the brilliant way that it avoids the login barrier. I recommend having a look at this site, before you know it you will have added your family tree. 

For various reasons I needed to connect to one of our SQL Server boxes which has been setup to run on a non standard port. At first I tried the normal way to address a port: 192.168.0.3:3000, but that wasn't working. After some googling I found that you need to use a comma:  192.168.0.3,3000.

I stumbled across a pretty cool feature of SQL Server Management Studio the other almost by accident. It turns out there is an option to send the operation you are doing to script. For example my screen shot shows the create new login dialog. Now there is no excuse for developers not to check in database change scripts (I'm referring to all those point and click database developers).

Well pigs must be flying, a couple of weeks ago I bought a black MacBook. My friend who is a mac user pretty much pressured me into it, the MacBook was some stock that was being replaced by the new MacBooks, so it represented a good savings.

So for the last week or so I've been playing with OS X.

Well its all official I've got my Tech-Ed 2007 ticket, I can't wait!

I last attended in 2005 and had a ball. This time I know a few more people who are also attending so it going to be so much better.

I'm looking forward to hopefully attending some sessions on silverlight and WPF.

After having a good read of the Family.Show reference application I've been blown away with the power of data binding. I think that with all the hype over how easy it is to now create fancy UI's, WPF may be overlooked for general business development, when in fact its perfect for your average business process application.  Of course that's not to say that these applications couldn't use an interaction specialist to help improve the users productivity, until business catch on that WPF has a slightly different development model (one with more focus on usability) it might be hard to justify the extra cost initially.

I've also just read Paul Stovell's data binding example based on winforms technology, it's not be as widely written about, but it seems that some pretty powerful data binding features exist in winforms today, it's just a matter of getting into the mind set. Its pretty cool how WPF databinding is introducing some new concepts to old technology.

I've spent some time looking at the Vertigo WPF reference application Family.Show. It's a really cool application, while I was playing around with it Rebecca saw it and immediately wanted it installed on her computer, she's been busy entering data into it. I hope an open source community forms around it.

The most interesting thing I found was a presentation by Scott Stanfield at Mix 07, he describes some of the lessons learnt from building this application. From the sounds of it the problem domain caused the bulk of the problems. It's certainly a testament to the design of the WPF that guys who have never used it before can produce something so stunning and the code is very nicely laid out.