Having just attended an excellent MSDN Technical Briefing on SQL Server 2005 I thought I'd take a moment to remind people about the various MSDN (and TechNet, for that matter) events on offer. The all important links for finding out what's coming up are:

As to the event itself, it was all very interesting, and despite the fact I've been using Yukon for a good few months now there was stuff that was new to me in each of the presentations:

  • Marcus Perryman: CLR integration and ADO.NET v2
  • Mike Taulty: T-SQL enhancements and improved XML support
  • Matthew Stephen: Business Intelligence (Integration Services, Analysis Services/Unified Dimension Model, and Reporting Services)

What particularly impressed me was that it wasn't just a day long marketing pitch, the presenters were very candid about things they don't like.

In particular, though, the new XML support looks compelling enough that I'm almost tempted to try to put together a simple 'blogging engine using just SQL Server and .NET v2.0 (well, I have been 'blogging for almost two years now without "rolling my own", which seems atypical for a geek 'blogger!). That'll be in the 25/26th hour of each day, of course...