VS 2005 Launch Tour Green Bay
On November 17th I attended the Microsoft SQL server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 Launch event in Green Bay WI.
It was a full day event. There were in my estimation about 200-250 people there.
There were the usual handful of vendors peddling their products and services, as well as their drawings (of which I always look forward to some good prizes!).
I haven’t done any programming in asp or vb. So I was interested what it could do for me.
The hotel casino had its spread of coffee, pastries, soda, juice and water for the taking. Of which I had none. The last thing I wanted to do was fall asleep.
The first session (morning – lunch) was about SQL server. Most of which I know nothing about. I would agree with my friend TDavid that it seemed geared toward large companies who have huge databases and infrastructure. The speaker, Kevin, did a pretty good job. He has a blog at http://blogs.technet.com/kevinremde
I was impressed with the reporting tools. What I did not know was that for much SQL database management that the database actually gets taken offline. With the 05 version, you can do what you need to do and it remains online(though not accessable). Including making upgrades to the server software. When you bring it back online, it will catch itself up and resynch to any other servers you have setup be it local, or remote. It was also nice to hear that XML is a 1st class data type in SQL.
When the morning session was finished, we were able to get the carrot dangled before us…. a brand new copy of SQL server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 with 1 license key. Cool!…
I had chatted a bit with a guy I met in the morning session. I found he doesn’t live too far from me. Someday I’d like to get together with him again so we could talk shop. He was more familiar with asp. The 2 of us headed over to the casino buffet. $8 for lunch. I was being careful not to overeat. Ever eat a whole bunch of food, and try to sit for 3.5 hours listening to someone talk? ZZZzz…
Ok the second session was on the Visual Studio 2005. Before the session began we watched a video promoting thecoderoom.com, an ‘Experimental’ site where they throw some programmers in a room and assign them a project. You can watch it online, as they plan using the tools in the seminar.
Finally, some programming! His name is Jacob Cynamon. He started the session off by explaining how to get the IE7 Beta version off of one of our promo disks.
Why? Well apparently the team that put his disk together, forgot to tell him that it included a certificate that expired in October 05. So he showed us to changed the system date on our pc(the clock in the taskbar) back a few months so the program would install.
What I do like about the studio suite is the drag and drop object orientation. Really cool how you can change the properties, and have objects like login and registration forms drag/droppable. Ok cool, a wysiwyg! Seriously bloated wysiwyg, to me anyhow.
I was trying to be objectionable, and still havn’t had the time to give it a fair shake yet. At one point Jacob brought up the point that visual studio has a new built in feature called a config page. In this page you can set a lot of the applications variables and procedures. Now in my mind, I was thinking “ok, a config page? this is exciting?”. From that point on, every thing I was being shown could be done in php as well. I’m not knocking it, but the only thing I found to be real positive was the drag and drop, not too much need for design, objects. You can make fairly easy template and template systems.
I must say my interest was captivated for the afternoon. After the session, there were the prize drawings, of which I didn’t win anything. Oh well. Of course the true benifit, was that after the 2nd session, we got to get in line for our free SQL/Studio 05 software AGAIN!
What I can say, is thank you for the free software. Now I can try to play and experiment with a new language.