I enjoyed very much visiting your country, meeting you, and presenting my favorite developer topics on SQL Server 2005.

• Feel free to download the demos here and the slides here.

Also, please send me any questions you might have to the email that I provided you during the conference, or post them here (as a comment).

I'm proud to be one of the folks acknowledged for making Visual Studio 2005 the thing of beauty that it is.

Congratulations to all recipients!

Here's a good resource on MSDN for troubleshooting ClickOnce deployments.

I've been hearing that there's been some issues with ClickOnce and RTM.

Say it isn't so! According to this article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, stock might be slim and lines might be long.

Ironically, one of the first questions I was asked in Dubai at the SQL Server 2005 launch event was "What day will the XBOX 360 launch in Dubai?".

Update 25 Nov - If the hyperlink above isn't working, try http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10092388

We've been getting some questions lately on this, and here are the answers:

• Partners at the Certified Partner level will receive the new Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition with MSDN Premium Subscription.  As before, this will include 5 MSDN licenses.

• Partners at the Gold Certified Partner level will receive the enhanced version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers with MSDN Premium Subscription. As before, this will include 10 MSDN licenses.

Notice that neither level include Architect or Test editions, nor do they include Team Suite. Read Ajay's post for more information.

My apologies for being late on uploading these, but I had to spend an incredible weekend touring Jerusalem and Bethlahem. Then, I jumped on a flight to Dubai, and am currently in a hotel in downtown, preparing for the SQL Server Magazine Roadshow tomorrow.

My sample code from my Keynote, Asynchronicity, Security, SMO, and Mobile presentations, as well as the afternoon of the SQLCLR seminar is in the process of being uploaded. I should have a link in a day or two. Please email me if you need something before then!

Thanks again for attending my sessions. I really enjoyed visiting your country, meeting you, and helping launch SQL Server 2005!

Update (23 Nov) - I haven't found the official site for the slides and demo code, so I've uploaded them here.

In two recent articles, in eWeek and SearchVB.com, it seems that Ivar Jacobson (one of the fathers of UML and RUP) has recently joined the Microsoft VSIP program. He is working on the Essential Unified Process (Essential UP) that is going to be integrated into Visual Studio 2005. Essential UP will be a more agile and lightweight development process based on good practices and principles of both MSF and RUP.

Thanks to a student, Jim Munn, for originally asking the question "When adding a property to an object that uses System.Collections.Generic.List<> the designer doesn't show a relation to the class that the generic collection is typed to. Why not?"

So, let's assume you have two classes: Customer and Order

Notice how, by default, the association is not displayed between the Customer and Order class. By right-clicking either the mOrders field or Orders property and selecting Show as Collection Association, the association will be visualized:

Thanks to one of my favorite attendees, Oren Ellenbogen, who is a CodeSmith guru, for providing a CodeSmith solution to my SQL Server concordance generator that I demonstrated at SQL Week in Israel.

A "concordance generator" is something I came up with, which scans through all of the columns, in all of the tables, in a database, and looks for anomalies, such as two columns with the same name, but with different data types, sizes, nullability, etc. It's good for people who like their database structures just so -- like Monk!

Check out this guy's page. For a small fee, he'll "sell" you the information on how to get all of those benefits. What people don't realize is that this is just the ISV Empower program, and you can go directly to Microsoft for this, if you qualify.

For an additionaly laugh, check out his feedback comments - some suckers and some informed folks.

Hope I saved you the finder's fee!

Check out the ASP.NET Podcast site. This is a podcast geared towards the Microsoft .NET Framework and ASP.NET development. The blog is setup for new content and includes an image gallery which lists photos of the listeners.

Thank you everyone for attending my talks. I'm going to start answering the questions I've been asked here. Feel free to email me if you have additional questions, or if my answer(s) aren't clear.

Q. Can I convert .RDLC (ReportViewer control) files to .RDL (Reporting Services) files?
A. You bet. Check out this page for more information.

Q. How can I clear out all the connection pools from my middle-tier
A. ADO.NET 2.0 has the new SqlConnection.ClearAllPools() static method.

My friend, Wallace McClure's book will be out soon (end of November). If you will be doing any ADO.NET 2.0 development, against SQL Server, Oracle, or MySQL, then I recommend you check out his book. Here's the page on Amazon.

My fellow Team System MVP, Willy-Peter Schaub from South Africa has been putting together many cool VSTS posters. These are print-ready JPG drawings, covering things like installation, security, and source control.

You can watch Steve Ballmer's keynote here. I've also uploaded a few photos from the event. My personal favorite was meeting Paul senior from Orange County Choppers (American Chopper).

Tip: To view my photos, select Conferences and Launch 2005 - San Francisco.

I you have a DNN site, and are wanting to run a knowledge base for you company or product, then look no further. The KBDnn module was built by the best guys in the business, and for the cheap price, you can't go wrong.

Now that VS/SQL/VSTS are available for download, I've been getting a lot of licensing questions, especially about MSDN/U subscriptions and the elusive Team Suite. Ajay Sudan put together a nice, consise FAQ at the VSTS forum.

Today is the day. Visual Studio 2005 (including all VSTS editions) and SQL Server 2005 are available to the public for download from MSDN.

Thank you for attending my talk this morning. Here is a text file with my sample code. Enjoy!

The Team Foundation Server setup experience has been evolving for over a year now in response to feedback Microsoft has received. While they’ve made significant progress since the first release last year as Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Refresh with Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server, there’s still more that can be done. Microsoft has created a survey to ask some specific questions based on your experience with Team Foundation Server Beta 3. If you have attempted (successfully or otherwise) to install Team Foundation Server Beta 3, Microsoft invites you to participate in this brief online survey.

The survey can be taken anonymously, or you have the option of providing contact information should wish to be contacted about your setup experience. Partial surveys are not preserved, so please complete the survey before navigating away from the page.

Microsoft has listed the VSTS MVPs on their site. You can view their profiles here.

What is an MVP?
The MVP award is a one-year renewable reward given to just under 3,000 customers worldwide who are community leaders for their past year's accomplishments in a specific competency (ex: ASP.NET, C#, VSTS). A non-Microsoft employee is nominated by an employee or other MVP, their contributions to the community are evaluated, and they are voted on by an MVP Lead and PG Lead. Contributions can include answering MSDN Forum questions, writing articles & books, having an active & popular blog, working with the product teams, running a local user group, giving presentations, etc.   A quick intro to what an MVP is can be found on the MVP Website.

Team System MSDN Public Chat

Visual Studio Team System for Software Developer & Visual Studio Team System for Software Testers

When: Wednesday 10/19/05 @ 10am PST

What: The Profiler, Test Tools (Unit, Generic, Manual), Web & Load Testing, and Code Analysis (FxCop & PREFast).  We have questions for you, will answer questions from you, and will chat about the exciting new technology.

A bit belated in this posting, but Steven Borg and I are both Microsoft MVPs now! I attended the MVP summit a few weeks ago as an RD, and I've got to say that I am in some good company, and am really impressed at the level of support Microsoft gives to this program.

Seattle Code Camp is just around the corner - about 10 days away. Steven Borg and I are going to be presenting a couple of Team System and SQL Server 2005 topics at camp and we hope to see you there!

A friend of mine sent me this link. It's a pretty good refrence page on the core keyboard shortcuts.

Microsoft’s senior vice president, Steven Sinofsky, discusses support for the PDF Format in Office 12. It appears it will be as simple as "Save-as".

Read the Q&A here.