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: Code Title Speaker Score WIN371 Effective Troubleshooting...

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...

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...

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...

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...

[By the way, apologies for those who read my blog who have no interest in TechEd Europe, as 90% of my blogs over the next week will have some relation to the event. I'll mix and match session write-ups with organisational and content announcements, so...

Draft v0.1 - 30th June 2004 In this white paper, we'll discuss the integration of .NET Framework development support into SQL Server 2005, through the integration of the Common Language Runtime directly into the relational engine. We'll examine the...

I'm heading down to Amsterdam tomorrow to check out the venue and put the last finishing touches to the keynote. As the technical content owner for the event, I'll be blogging throughout the week with details of any session changes, top scoring sessions...

Just seven days to go before the start of TechEd Europe! The session voting is now complete : over 1100 of you took the time to pre-select which sessions you were likely to attend. Nobody is tied to the choices they made, of course, but this information...

According to today's Independent , an Australian man yesterday became the world's oldest skydiver, beating the record previously set by a 94 year old Norwegian. Frank Moody, aged 101 years old , accepted a drunken dare from his mates and jumped in tandem...

FotoVision has released to the web (thanks to Ed Kaim for drawing this to my attention). This is a fantastic new smart client application suite developed by Vertigo Software (some of the brightest developers I know, who were also responsible for the original...

In respond to popular demand from attendees who want to plan their schedule in advance, I've taken an extract of the current session database as an Excel spreadsheet . Hope this helps you make the most of TechEd Europe!

Just a fortnight to go now until TechEd Europe. The schedule is now completed, the attendee website goes live this afternoon, and session voting has started. A quick explanation of session voting: when you log in to the attendee website for the first...

Selling Son's Beloved PlayStation 2 as a Punishment! Xbox owners are better behaved, of course... :-)

If so, we're keen to hear from you ...

It's six months since I started to compile a list of .NET developers in the UK who blog. As a microcosm of the overall expansion of blogging, it's been an interesting experiment. The original list had just 17 names on it. As of today, I've recorded a...

It's nigh-on impossible to keep track of all the varied products and announcements from Microsoft even as an employee, let alone as a customer! It took someone external (thanks Damir !) to alert me to Microsoft Expression , a vector-based illustration...

TechEd Europe commences in three weeks from today! As of this morning, we've finally finished locking down the sessions and speakers , which is a major milestone in the planning process. We've taken some of the feedback from TechEd US on board and made...

Mike Gunderloy always comes up with the goods when it comes to cool new software. Yesterday he pointed to the winners of the Tablet PC development contest that PC Magazine has been running since last year's PDC. The well-deserved winner (in my opinion...

The technical beta for Windows Media Player 10 has just released to microsoft.com . As indicated in this article from news.com, some of the most significant features will only become clear once new digital media players become available, but there's some...