The SSDS team is taking major steps this week and I thought of sharing the work we have done over the last 2 months with you, our readers.  We announced our "restricted beta" at MIX 08 .  The response was great and thank you all for your interest in SSDS.  I am happy to say that we have been on-boarding registrants over the past 8 weeks and the pace has picked up over the past 3 weeks.  You can argue that we are not doing this fast enough and some of us would agree with you.  But the team wants to make sure that we provide our beta users with a great experience.  It is hard to argue with that.  Having said that, we are on our way to clear up the registration backlog.  Thank you for your patience.  If you have not registered yet but would like to register, please visit us at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/dataservices/default.mspx and click on the Register for Free Beta button and get yourself registered.

We promised to refresh SSDS every 8 to 10 weeks and I am happy to let you know that we are now in the middle of our second refresh since MIX 08.  This is a big deal for us.  Most of us cut our teeth building great client and server software.  We are now learning how to build a great service.  We are learning how to deliver new features every 8-10 weeks instead of every 24-30 months.  We are learning how to keep our service up and running 24/7. So I am really proud that we landed everything we wanted to in our last sprint.  Our operations team will be rolling out all that good work over the next few days.  They did a great job rolling out the previous refresh (thanks Kyle, Tracy, Dustin and team) and I am confident that they will do it again.  The product team is now in the middle of our next 8 week sprint.  Planning is done, coding has begun and you can expect to see the results in another 8 weeks time.   I feel great about how fast we have come up to speed on this new rythm of shipping and the amount of value getting added every sprint.  You will hear about some of the new features we delivered in the last sprint once we complete our rollout.  Stay tuned.

As part of this refresh, we now have the SQL Server Data Service Primer up on MSDN.  Thanks to the product team and especially Mohan Vanmane who worked diligently with several people and teams across Microsoft to get this up on MSDN.  Now it is up to you our customers and users to let us know how we can improve this primer and provide you with the information and guidance you need to build compelling applications for your customers.

Last but not the least, Nigel Ellis and Niraj Nagrani did a webcast on SSDS recently.  Check it out at https://www106.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032376634&role=attend&pw=63B495CA.  Just enter your name and press return and it will take you to the links for viewing the webcast.  It will give you a good introduction to SSDS, the value propositions and how you can take advantage of it.  Again, we would like to hear from you what you would like us to cover in future webcasts.

Thanks for your time.

Namashkar,
Soumitra Sengupta
Architect, SSDS