What a Surreal Day!

Today was one of those VERY strange days..

For starters, today was the first day of the SSWUG Ultimate Virtual Conference (by the way, there’s still 2 days left and you can still register. Use code VCTAF457840-140 when you do!) during which I presented 3 sessions on Visual Studio Team System Database Edition. They had been filmed a couple of weeks ago, but this was the day they went live.

Next up, today was also the Microsoft Team System Big Event in Denver (see my previous post about that). This event had a lot of great speakers, including Steve Lange, Jerry Nixon, Joe Shirey, Rob Bagby and Peter Provost. For some reason they also let me present a session.

So you may wonder, what’s so surreal about that? Well, it turns out Rob was presenting the session on “Data Dude” (or Database Edition as he called it) at the Big Event. My 3 sessions at the SSWUG conference were also on Data Dude. The timing worked out such that Rob presented his session about the same time as my first one was being repeated at the SSWUG event. We used slides built from the same master deck, so I was literally watching my video (muted) while in the room with Rob and noticing that he was talking about many of the same topics at the same time…. Quite surreal!

Anyway, days 2 and 3 of the SSWUG conference are up now, and I’ve still got 3 Business Intelligence sessions to “deliver”.

SSWUG Online FREE Community Event

The good people over at the SQL Server Worldwide Users Group (SSWUG) are hosting a FREE online event to showcase some of the best sessions from past Virtual Conferences. The event will be held online Friday April 17th, starting at 9am Pacific time. Info about the event:

About the SSWUG Community Virtual Event
We're working to bring you real-world information about SQL Server 2008, Share Point, Silver Light, with tips about new features, functionality and much more.

• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services - Designing and Managing High Performance Cubes: Donald Farmer. With Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Analysis Services offers advanced features for design and manageability. This session will explore in data two of these features: the best practices design alerts and dynamic management views. Design alerts guide you with important advice throughout the development stage of a cube. We'll show how to work with the alerts, and how to manage their various subtleties. Having deployed a more efficient cube, the dynamic management views enable the administrator to query for information regarding connections, sessions, and server performance. We will introduce these views and drill down into many examples of their usage.
• Useful, effective, pre-made SharePoint templates-- from Microsoft, for free: Callahan. Need a help desk, timecard, or vacation request site? Considering just creating them yourself? Don't. Not until you explore the pre-existing application templates available from Microsoft. Free for download, Microsoft has 40 fantastic application templates, not to mention the Community Kit for SharePoint with offerings such as enhanced blog templates, or sites for user groups. So before you invest time and technology in rolling your own, check out this session and get an idea of what's been rolled for you.
• Silverlight for Beginners: Tim Heuer. XAML, WPF, VS, Blend...what are all these acronyms? Let’s take a deep breath and step back to look at the spectrum of what Silverlight is (and isn’t) and what you need to know starting from ground zero. No knowledge of WPF or Silverlight is required and well get you started building your first Silverlight application in no time!
• Introduction to Data Dude: Ted Malone. In this session attendees will learn about Microsoft Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Developers aka Data Dude. This product provides database developers with tools for database development, change management and testing. This session will walk through the available features of data dude and detail where they can be best utilized.
• SQL Server Round Table: Paul Nielsen, Chris Shaw, Stephen Wynkoop. Stephen, Chris and Paul sit down in an open forum and discuss questions about SQL Server 2008 and questions that have come up from the past conferences. This session will show some of the different opinions that developers and administrators have when working with SQL Server.

To register for this FREE event, check out the URL here: https://www.vconferenceonline.com/shows/spring09/sql/s09event.asp