To all of my attendees at the Lincolnshire MSDN event,

First off, thank you very much for attending my event - there was a lot of great excitement and interaction and we all had the opportunity to explore some awesome current developer tools, as well as some future tools.

That said, I wanted to reassure those who were concerned about some features of SQL Server 2005, and the Workbench in particular.  I got in touch with some of the Yukon devs and they assured me that with the 'Debug' feature (remember: “This feature has not yet been implemented” :-P ), will enable rich debugging, as long as the source and pdb files have been deployed to the server.

Also, the question came up about deploying assemblies outside of Visual Studio.  Using a SQL script, DBAs can catalog assemblies with CREATE ASSEMBLY (or call DROP ASSEMBLY to remove from the catalog, or even ALTER ASSEMBLY to add debug information, among other things).  So, our fears, both yours and mine, were slightly unfounded, but always welcome.  By sharing your concerns, we gain valuable feedback and learn what we can improve.

Talking about feedback, I wanted to answer one final (but popular) attendee question: How can I get in the beta programs?  Just like Dilbert says, “I gotta get me some of that.”  I know that it's hard to see all of these cool tools that are coming out in the future and not having the opportunity to play with them today.  I mentioned this to one of my colleagues and he pointed me to BetaPlace.  If you want a chance to get involved with our beta programs, this is a good place to sign up.

Now that I have said my piece, I am going to open up the floor to comments.  I encourage you to click Reply and provide feedback on this post (or others).

And as always, happy coding,

Jacob

PS Several of you came out to the .NET Pub Club I held after the event.  I had a lot of fun talking about developer and non-developer issues alike, and want to thank you for joining me.  I look forward to my next event in Lincolnshire, and hope to see you all once again.  For those who could not make the Pub Club, remember to plan ahead, as I'll be having another one next time I'm in your neck of the woods.