Jeff Beehler has tagged me which means it's my turn to write five things about myself which most people may not already know about me. Here goes...

1. When I was 5 years old I learned to play chess. It was my favorite activity back then, and I became quite good at it. Of course I was no Bobby Fischer, but I was playing (and winning) against people three or four times my age. I even competed in a national tournament and finished pretty high for my age category. Alas, nowadays my chess skills are pretty much average. I think it's much easier to be good at something like chess when your mind isn't filled with the usual worries an adult has (paying bills, completing projects, etc.). At least that's the excuse I tell myself for why I'm not as good as I was when I was a kid... <g>
2. When I was in middle school, my friends and I made a lot of homemade movies for fun and for school projects. Back then we didn't have any editing hardware and there was no such thing as consumer-ready editing software so the quality of the scene stitching was pretty poor, but we had a lot of fun and the movies we made are fun to watch to this day. I think my early appreciation for filmmaking is why I really enjoy filming Channel 9 videos today.
3. I absolutely love a good crawfish boil! I think it's the addictive nature of the endorphins your body releases as you taste the spices. I can easily eat three or four pounds in a sitting and be happier than a clam. I'm hoping to take a trip to the south as soon as they come back into season.
4. My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was Daniel Boone. And I'm also related to the only baby who was born on the Mayflower: Oceanus (see here). Oceanus died before she was able to bear offspring, but my grandmother has traced our genealogy back to her parents.
5. My family is diversified across the technology industry. I obviously work for Microsoft; my older brother, Brad, works for IBM; my sister, Paige, is a graphics designer so she tends to use a Mac from time to time; my brother Danny was a Linux geek for a while but now he works for Microsoft as a Systems Engineer; and finally my youngest brother Drew is still in school at the University of Florida pursuing his MS in Decision Information Sciences (the same degree that Danny and I have). We're pretty sure he's either going to wind up at Microsoft or take an ironic turn and head off to somewhere like Google. But in the meantime, he's working as a Web Programmer for the company I co-founded.

Since it's my turn to tag someone I'll pick Grace Francisco, Mike Swanson, Dan Fernandez, and Brian Goldfarb.

I'm pleased to report that just one month after the RTM bits became available we have published our first case study showcasing one of the many companies who has adopted Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals (aka "DBPro", aka "DataDude", etc.). The customer is Gulf Coast Seal, where Jeff Lynch has been a long-time supporter of DBPro. If you're curious about how DBPro might help your organization, definitely give the case study a quick read to see how it helped Jeff and his team.

Hint: If you download the .doc file on the right-hand of the page then it will be easier to see the screenshot.

We recently made some changes to the download of the Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals Add-on to try to clear up some initial confusion customers were reporting. This is the add-on which installs into Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite edition and provides the additional functionality provided by Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals. Here is a quick list of the changes, hopefully this simplifies things a bit:

Add-on no longer called a "Trial" - The add-on can be used in a trial mode when installed with the Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite 180-day Trial Edition. When running in this mode you will get all of the Team Suite and Database Professionals functionality, and both of these solutions will stop working when your trial time period expires. However, if you own a "full" (non-trial) edition of Team Suite then this add-on will not expire since you are entitled to receive the Database Professionals functionality for free as a benefit of owning Team Suite edition. Hence it didn't really make sense to name this add-on a "Trial" by default when it can in fact be installed as a full add-on provided that you have an appropriate license to Team Suite.

.EXE and .ISO available - Previously we chose to offer only a .ISO file for download, which required you to either mount that image or use a CD burning program to create media. We are still offering an .ISO file, but we are now also providing a self-extracting archive file (the .EXE) which you can download and quickly run to get started.

Documentation Clarification - Remember that this add-on does not provide the Team Edition for Database Professionals documentation. To get the documentation, you can either view it online or you can download and install a newer version of the MSDN Library which includes this documentation. At the time of my blog post, the latest version is available here.

Hopefully those changes clear up some confusion - but if you still have questions please visit the Team Edition for Database Professionals Forum.