hey there!
What a great launch event we had in Boston last week. During the keynote, one of our local customers talked about their great work with SQL Server 2008 (yes, that's right, in all its beta glory). The customer spoke highly of the SQLCAT (SQL Customer Advisory Team) and how the team helped them navigate the rough spots. This reminded me to visit the team's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlcat/default.aspx
Via the blog, I discovered a great new resource from them: SQLCAT.com
Nice!
Oh by the way, if you are looking for some great SQL oriented content, why don't you join us in about a month...
This session will introduce SQL Server Data Services. We will talk about the SQL Server Data Services data model, its query language, and how it alleviates the pain of Healthcare data sharing. We will talk about the standards based protocols, service end-points and how to store, retrieve and process data using this service. We will also talk about the business model (pay as you grow) and introduce the beta 1 of the service.
This session will explore the new geometric and geographic features of SQL Server 2008, and show how they can be brought together with the Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight 2 to produce compelling mapping applications. Emphasis will be placed on how SQL Server 2008 supports geographic queries and how both WPF and Silverlight can be used to provide an interactive layer on which user data can be added to maps. This session presumes familiarity with .NET 3.X and XAML (but will quickly cover the basics as we dig deeper into the SQL 2008.)