There were only two sessions this morning. I started off with a deep and very technical look at the data mining algorithms in SQL 2005. I understood some of it, but I need to brush up on my statistics.

For the second session of the day, Peter Willmot and I ran a session on basic SQL security concepts for the architects and developers. It seemed well received and it was very well attended for the last session of TechEd.

The closing keynote was given by Stephen Attenborough, Commercial Director of Virgin Galactic. He gave us a very entertaining overview of Virgin Galactic up until now, including their monumental first launch of SpaceShip One, and of their vision of things to come. I will remember the video of the first flight of SpaceShip One for quite some time. I so want to do that trip into space. One day.

And the final thing to close out the conference, the official announcement of SQL Server 2008 RTM. An excellent end to an excellent conference.

Thanks and congrats to all the project team, all the organisers, all the speakers and everyone else who helped to make TechEd such a great conference. I look forward to the tenth TechEd South Africa next year.

Congrats to all in the SQL Server team, all the developers, testers, managers and everyone else involved. You guys did an awesome job.

i ran two chalk and talk sessions today, both turned out better than i expected and I was very impressed with both the turn out and involvement of the people at the second. I’ll see if I can get related materials up later in the week.

Other sessions that I attended included a very impressive look at game development using XNA, WPF and Silverlight, with a bit of apache chucked in for good measure. The session was partially delivered by a presenter sitting in Seattle and partially by the presenter in the room. The slow internet access down in this end of the world showed, but not too much.

The second session that i found time for was a quick look at clustering in Windows server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. No more unexpected errors during or after installation. The pre-checks should catch most things. Definitely a good thing.

Lastly, i attended Gert Drapers’ advanced VSTS Database session, and got a good look at unit tests and data generation. Who said you can’t unit test a database?

Of course, TechEd wouldn’t be TechEd without the parties, and so tonight there was the closing party, on Durban beach. Here are a few photos.

I started the day with Peter Willmot’s session on BI, specifically on cubes and how to present them to the users. Couple of cool sharepoint features, including reporting service web parts and the excel services. Since I committed to learning sharepoint, it’s interesting to see just how much integrates into it.

The second session that i decided to attend was on rich interfaces in WPF. Very, very impressive what can be done in WPF wil minimal work. I think that (along with a refresher on C# 2.0) is joining sharepoint on my list of things to learn this year.

The last session before lunch was another sharepoint session, this time on creating sharepoint features in Visual Studio. Also very interesting, especially the information on creating workflows for sharepoint.

After lunch I attended a session on Blobs in SQL 2008. It wasn’t bad, but seemed a bit shallow. Gert Drapers’ presentation on Data Dude (aka Visual Studio Team System Database Edition) showed some of the fantastic uses for that tool for database developers. Effective version control over database schemas, refactoring tables and stored procedures, change generation based on two projects, two databases or two schema definitions, or any combination. Very nice. I do want to play with that tool.

The last session of the day was a quick overview of security in .net 3.5. Basically what to do and what not to do to make the application hard to hack. I’m very familiar with database security, sometimes it’s good to take a look at the other side.

I have a whole bunch of photos, I’ll probably only get them online much later this week

So, TechEd South Africa started today. So far it’s been fun. As usual for the local TechEd events, the sunday was the opening keynote and a nice party. Some points that struck me during the keynote:

• Microsoft is heavily pushing the virtualisation technologies, including Hyper-V
• The application virtualisation looks fantastic for large corporations
• Silverlight 2 looks very cool
• Still no release date for SQL Server 2008

I have nothing particularly technical, just a couple pictures of the opening party.

The final agenda was made available a few days ago and there’s a lot of very nice content. In fact, there are over 200 sessions being offered over the course of two and a half days on a wide variety of topics.

I’m doing two Chalk and Talk sessions:

1. What to Watch – Finding Performance Problems Before the Users Do. Tuesday, 08:00
2. Effective Indexing and Query Optimisation. Tuesday, 14:45

If any readers of this blog are going to be there, please come and introduce yourselves.

I’m doing this on the assumption that goals made public are more likely to be kept than goals told to no one. Even if no one’s going to hold me to the goals I set, the fact that I announced them to the world (or the small part of it that reads here) makes it more difficult to discard the goal.

So, what’s planned for the next 6 months?

The biggest thing coming up (other than the new job) is that I’m going to be presenting two Chalk and Talk sessions at TechEd South Africa. Both will be SQL Server focused, one on finding performance problems (hopefully before the users do) and the second on fixing those performance problems. Any readers who are going to be at TechEd, please drop by and say Hi.

I’m going to be applying for my MCT certification within a few months and I’m looking forward to doing some formal training. I’ve been doing some informal training at my office over the last few months and I have really enjoyed doing it.

Now, onto the goals for the remainder of the year:

• I intend to read at least 3 IT books over the next 6 months. At least one of them will be SQL-related
• I intend to blog once a week here, and once a month at Grounding
• Listen to at least 1-2 IT-related podcasts a week.
• I’m going to try to watch a webcast every fortnight. Limited download speed makes this a little difficult
• I will learn at least the basics of Windows Sharepoint and one other MS product that I currently know nothing about
• I am going to spend a lot more time on my Masters thesis. I intend to have the experiments designed and at least partially implemented by the end of the year.

That shouldn’t be too hard. Maybe.