SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 & BizTalk Server 2006 Launch

Visual Studio 2005 Team System is an extensible life-cycle tools platform that significantly expands the Visual Studio 2005 product line and helps software teams collaborate to deliver modern service-oriented solutions. This session spotlights key features of Visual Studio 2005 Team System and demonstrates how integrating this product into the development process reduces the complexity of delivering high-quality, fully tested applications.

The software developers at Whidbey Rocks use Team System to orchestrate the construction of their concert ticketing and promotion system which includes Web applications, smart client applications, SQL Server 2005 databases and BizTalk Server 2006 integration. This presentation incorporates five roles: project management, infrastructure architect, application architect, developer and tester. While most of the actual development will be performed in the subsequent sessions, this kick-off session will allow us to explain the goals of software, set up the team project, select a methodology, identify the team, design the architecture and send out tasks to each of the team members to construct individual components of the application.

Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 combine to form a rich platform for building, testing and deploying state-of-the-art Web applications. ASP.NET 2.0 is replete with new features from data source controls and master pages to membership and role management services - features that reduce the amount of code required to create a typical Web site by up to 70%. Visual Studio 2005 features an all-new Web development interface that speeds the development process while offering a rich design-time experience and seamless integration with Visual Studio 2005 Team System.

The primary goal of this presentation is to introduce developers to ASP.NET 2.0's most compelling new features and to the Visual Studio 2005 features that support them. A secondary goal is to demonstrate some of the ways in which Visual Studio 2005 Team System can benefit Web developers and to drive home the message that ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 Team System offer a compelling upgrade to Visual Studio 2003 and ASP.NET 1.1. An important take-away is that these products are second to none when it comes to building scalable, high-performance Web applications.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 greatly simplifies the development and deployment of smart client applications targeting both the Windows and Microsoft Office platforms. This session demonstrates how to create sophisticated, online/offline-capable applications and smart documents using Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Office 2005 and Windows Forms 2.0.  Attendees will also learn about ClickOnce, Microsoft's new development technology which combines the power of Windows-based development with the flexibility of Web-based deployment. Highlights include how to use Visual Studio skills to create rich applications that take advantage of existing functionality in Excel, Word and Outlook, all of which are part of Microsoft Office 2003.

The central message of this presentation is that end-users and developers alike prefer software that provides a rich user experience - software that enriches and simplifies the user's experience in the most natural way for the task at hand. A supporting theme is one of data access that best suits the end-users' software-use lifestyle as well as situational environment. For example, we show data that is accessed by a ticket-sales tool, which is connected, but then the same data is accessed from an Excel-based application in both the connected and dis-connected states. Additionally, the Excel-based application demonstrates the use of VSTO to provide a flexible and familiar environment for a professional, such as a analyst, who can benefit from the rich features of Excel rather than learn a custom application. (Though in fact, the Excel workbook is also a custom solution.)

SQL Server 2005 offers a more integrated and powerful platform on which your mission critical systems can be built. With the ever-increasing need to have more data accessible immediately, databases are becoming larger and real-time decision making is becoming a requirement. SQL Server 2005 boasts key database engine enhancements to make this possible. Real-time, data-driven decisions can be made - even while part of the database is damaged; and the database can remain partially available, even while being restored. Database Mirroring allows a hot, stand-by mirror database to be brought online immediately to handle user requests with transparent client redirect. Online Index Maintenance allows indexes to be completely restructured for improved performance yet does not require that a table be taken offline to rebuild it. Peer-to-peer Replication increases data availability through better scalable redundancy by distributing data across multiple database servers that can be transactionally synchronized with any peer database. Snapshot Isolation allows readers to access consistent data while not being blocked by writers, improving accuracy and concurrency in highly volative databases.

In this session, you will get an overview of the features in SQL Server 2005 that will enable you to build and manage a highly available enterprise data platform.

• Table and Index Partitioning
• Partial Database Availability
• Granular Restores: Page, File, Filegroup and Database
• Fast File Initialization
• Database Mirroring
• Failover Clustering Enhancements - Restart Recovery Time Reduced
• Peer-to-Peer Replication
• Online Index Operations
• Snapshot Isolation
• DMVs for Operations and Management

Mission critical systems must be architected to be secure, scalable, performant, reliable and deployment-flexible from the ground up. SQL Server 2005 offers new features to give you options to architecture solutions for today's demanding needs - with new built-in features such as reliable messaging, snapshot isolation, data encryption and native web services. These new technologies can ensure your systems are secure, scalable and available. Furthermore, flexibility in design and storage choice allows you to create a hybrid environment with the right tools for the job. Using relational, XML or custom types and then programming with Transact-SQL or .NET procedural code, you have all the options available to make the database design more robust and flexible. From improvements in Transact-SQL like TRY/CATCH error handling to built-in subsystems like Service Broker and Notification Services, flexibility is key.

In this session, you will see how built-in support for XML and XML-relational hybrid designs, .NET procedural code and database-enabled middle-tier cache coherency increase your design and deployment choices.

• Security Enhancements
  • Password policies and proxy accounts
  • Network security - network and login encryption
  • Database encryption - key storage and management
  • Data security - No access to system metadata
  • More granular permissions - all permissions are grantable
• Storage Options: Relational, Semi-Structured, Custom and Unstructured
• SQLCLR: Custom Types, Aggregations and Procedural Code
• Transact-SQL Enhancements: Error Handling, PIVOT, Ranking and Hierarchies
• Native Web Services: Query Notifications, Cache Coherency, Man-to-many notifications through Notification Services
• Service Broker: Reliable Messaging

SQL Server 2005 introduces new capabilities that will once again redefine the reach of business intelligence. The application of a new generation of robust, high-performance tools will unlock business data as never before - every aspect of data analytics processing has been examined, improved and made easier to develop and deliver in a reliable, secure and scalable manner to deliver end-to-end integration of business intelligence integration with operational systems. This new power reduces the impedance of decision making systems as information arrives at the application faster than ever before, and the same power can also eliminate the need for multiple data marts, manage the complexity of data warehouse systems and bring down the cost of deploying and managing this class of system.

This session will provide a glimpse at the new features, following data as it arrives in the operational store, as it is transformed and loaded into the data warehouse and as it flows into Analysis Services and generates Key Performance Indicators and then into Reporting Services reports: watch as SQL Server 2005 "Integrates, Analyzes and Reports".

• Engine Enhancements
• Table and Index Partitioning - for fast data load into DW
• SQL Server Integration Services
• Analysis Services
• Reporting Services

The SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and BizTalk Server 2006 platform creates an extensible server and tools platform that helps administrators and development teams collaborate to reduce the complexity of delivering modern service oriented database architectures.

This session will highlight the tools and features included and show practical examples of how this can reduce the complexity of delivering modern data-driven solutions that are designed for today's larger databases and immediately accessible data.

• SQL Server Management Studio Solutions/Projects and Visual Source Safe Integration
• SQL Profiler with Performance Monitor Integration
• VSTS Integration
• BizTalk Integration