Each year there's a few speakers who compete vigorously throughout the conference to get the best overall session score. This year it could be close! Here's today's leaderboard:
Remember that there's a draw for critique forms submitted in each slot: there are over twenty Motorola MPx 200 Smartphones available as prizes!
This morning at TechEd Europe, we announced the introduction of "Express" editions of a number of Visual Studio tools and SQL Server. The Express products are lightweight, easy to use, easy to learn tools for hobbyists, enthusiasts, and students who want to build dynamic Windows applications and Web sites. We also announced the release of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1.
The Express products consist of:
Go here to download or find out more!
Lastly, a big "well done" to Andy Sterland, a Software Engineering undergraduate from the University of Hull. Andy had never done anything like this before; but he learnt the product from scratch in just over a week and did a fantastic job of demonstrating it as part of the official announcement.
We started planning today's keynote back in March. Keynotes are always problematic at conferences of the scale of TechEd: most attendees have an expectation that there will be one, but the feedback scores suggest that they're not the absolute highlight of the conference in most cases. We know full well that in an ideal world we'd have Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer as keynote speakers at every event, but of course that's not possible. So instead, we wanted to try something really different for this week's conference: rather than having one single keynote speaker talking about a specific product or technology area, we put together a series of 7 separate demos that highlight diversity of innovation coming from within Microsoft. The idea was to show off some fun areas of Microsoft that attendees might not have been aware of, as well as making several product announcements. So, in order:
I'd love to hear your feedback on the keynote, if you attended - this was a very different keynote from our point of view, as I mentioned above, and it wasn't risk free! Would you like to see similar kinds of keynote at future Microsoft events?
Over 4000 attendees have registered thus far, leaving just another 2000 to register before the keynote at 10am tomorrow. We had a surge of registrations in the last week, which means we have about 500 more attendees than for last year's conference. As a result, you might see some slightly annoyed-looking speakers, as we now don't have enough conference bags to go around!
Congratulations to the top three pre-conference seminars (ranked by overall score):
Make sure you're at the keynote: with 3D glasses, 6000 drums, several product announcements and information on how you can make free telephone calls throughout the conference, it should be a blast!
Lastly, don't forget to add your own questions for the panels. I'm hosting a panel on SQL Server 2005 and futures, so let me know what questions you'd like the SQL team to answer...
See you tomorrow.
Scalability Experts have recently published a great white paper (PDF) that compares SQL Server 2000 running on 32-bit and 64-bit architectures and benchmarks both versions against known loads. The whitepaper uses a Unisys ES7000 mainframe-class server using Itanium 2 processors. The most interesting results were using the 64-bit edition of Analysis Services, where they demonstrated far higher headroom in terms of number of members and partition processing. Some of the most severe limitations of the 32-bit edition will be eradicated when SQL Server 2005 arrives, due to the rearchitecture of much of the OLAP engine, but the enhanced throughput of a 64-bit environment will still have a major effect.
The paper doesn't go into deep technical detail on how the benchmarks were conducted, which is a pity, but if you're looking for a broad technical overview of how the introduction of 64-bit will improve SQL Server scalability, it's not a bad read at all.