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The day started out with more wireless woes at CommNet – the coverage here is terrible.  It’s an easy target for complaints and I’m lucky I brought my Verizon aircard (which is still terrible), but you would just expect that resolution on the internet access to be solved ASAP and all attention to be on it whenever there is an issue.

We started with the keynote with Paul Flessner.  He's the corporate VP of server products and had a lot to say about SQL Server 2005.  Finally in the messaging he showed some competitive benchmarking against Oracle.  It isn't often any exec points out the negatives in competetive products.  Paul pointed out the security issues that SQL has had in the past (and apologized again for Slammer) and showed charts of the number of security patches related to SQL for 2002-current (1 for 2004, 0 for this year).  He overlayed that with the security patches for Oracle (74 for 2004, 2 this year).  It wasn't necessarily a jab (well, okay it was), but more a reality check that it isn't easy to build global, enterprise software.  Oracle faces the same challenges that Microsoft does...it's just for some reason nobody airs their dirty laundry as much -- point being we all have it!

The first BattleBot built on .NET Compact Framework 2.0 was shown (uses a PocketPC as it's control system on the unit).  It came out to help do a demo on SQL failover -- by smashing a network switch with the hammer/razor blade arm it had.  Before that it helped with the first RFID raffle.  Each attendee has an RFID tag as part of our name badge -- they demo'd an app showing the use of that -- it was pretty cool.  The RFID “tag” is really a label -- looks like a standard Avery label...with a built-in RFID antenna.

I picked up a copy of the Visual Studio Team System book (beta edition) and have been perusing it -- Richard Hundhausen, et. al. did a great job!

Well, off to lunch...more later.

Please enjoy some of these other recent posts...

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