B# .NET Blog

Time for lunch again ;-). But some blogging first. As I mentioned in the previous post, there was a keynote by Andy Lees this morning. In my opinion, the keynote gave a good general overview of the upcoming set of technologies in the next couple of months and years. Starting with Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 which will be RTMed later this year in the week of November 7th, the next big plan is of course Longhorn, Exchange 12 and Office 12. In the meantime, Windows Server 2003 R2, Virtual Server 2005 SP1 and Exchange 2003 SP2 are pinned for later this year too.

The RFID stuff I mentioned earlier was used during a demo of Visual Studio 2005 development of a smart client application that does “traffic analysis“ of the event venue. Using the gathered data, one can decide (still theoretically) e.g. to send additional ATE folks to the ATE booth because there's a lot of people out there at a given moment. Pretty cool stuff to watch.

Another demo showed the use of Exchange 2003 and Windows Mobile 5.0 to enhance security on mobile devices, another one the use of MOM 2005 to monitor heterogeneous environments (using a Sun Solaris box :o) and yet another one compared the performance of SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 and the 64-bit edition of SQL Server 2005. And of course cost analysis stuff was omnipresent too, showing clearly the cost effectiveness of rolling out SQL Server 2005 Enterprise compared to the equivalent costs of Oracle and IBM's DB/2.

Other news: all attendees will receive not only Virtual Server 2005 Enterprise Edition and SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition but a copy of Visual Studio 2005 too once it has been released. I guess November will be party time for a lot of developers :-).

After the keynote I attended Jesper's session on “The Anatomy of a Network Hack“. Jesper did a great job showing various security problems (starting with a pretty simple SQL injection attack and the dramas that such an attack can bring) during a live 4-simultaneously-running-VPC-setup demo concluding by outlining some security in depth strategies that should help to overcome these problems using 10 simple tips (okay, security is more than that, but guidelines are a good starting point to kick off with). I'll post about this topic later on in the category “Security“ on my blog. This afternoon I'm planning to attend Gert Drapers' session on the SQLCLR in SQL Server 2005. I'll keep you posted guys!

And last but not least: about the network. Everything seems to work fine, logins go pretty smooth but unfortunately access to the mseventseurope website is rather slow right now. Wondering what the exact problem is; I guess Mr. Cheeseman will come up with a nice explanation later this week (if they noticed it too :d).