My day with Microsoft

I spent the majority of my day at the Microsoft launch event for SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and BizTalk Server 2006. Microsoft does events like this periodically across the country and they're often free (as this one was) or relatively inexpensive. They provide great insight into some of their new products and services and they often give away software, books, magazines, etc. At the very least it's free food and a day away from the office so I recommend them to anyone in the field.

This particular conference was pretty good, although I don't use BizTalk and I'll admit that some of the SQL stuff went over my head. I, like most of my readers, user SQL Server for small to medium web applications like content management systems, not things like massive enterprise-level transaction based banking systems.

I'd already been playing with Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 so I was mainly interested in the SQL Server 2005 info. Some of the new features were pretty interesting so here's a few of my random notes on that topic:

SQL 2005 now has an XML data type which you can use to store XML data. You can also store a schema for the data to validate against and use XQuery to query it within a SQL statement
End user ad-hoc reporting is now built into the Reporting Services allowing users to create reports on the fly
Improved error handling features have been added to T-SQL in the form of Try/Catch blocks
SQL 2005 now has built in data encryption functions using both symmetric and asymmetric keys
SQL-CLR allows you to write things like Stored Procedures, Functions, and Triggers in VB.NET or C#
New LOB support with varchar(MAX) and varbinary(MAX) allowing you to store large amounts of data without using text and image fields.
CacheSync - allows data from the database to be cached by IIS. When the data is updated, SQL Sever will automatically let IIS know to expire the cache.

One last thing, not SQL related, is that the new Team Foundation Server allows developers to work together and integrates new source code control functionality into Visual Studio as an alternative to SourceSafe. SourceSafe (even the new 2005 version) isn't exactly everyone's favorite application so let's hope this will be better.

That's it for now. I want to give a quick thank you to everyone who reads this blog for the positive feedback I've received so far. I love comments so keep posting them and/or send any ideas, stories, etc. to jay@codescene.com.