TechEd 2005: Day 2 Morning

Paul Flessner keynote had some sexy demos and a few good jokes (and some of usl got a little nervous with the Compact Framework battlebot breaking a SQL Server 2005 connection). Parafernalia aside, the most importants point for me were:

1. We've got an official launch date for Visual Studio 2005, Sql Server 2005, and Biztalk Server 2006: the week of November 7th (at least and not a minute too early).
2. Sql Server 2005 Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services are a killing combination. Low cost, high power BI is here, Oracle and IBM beware (I know I sounded like a marketing guy but for what I see the product does live up to the expectations).

After that I tried to get to Mike Hernández talk on Outlook and VS 2005 integration (with VSTO 2005 naturally) but the room was packed (I didn't mind sitting in the floor but I wasn't allowed), I just hope they repeat the session, it seems like Smart Clients development with Office we'll become hot in the coming months. So I went for a few minutes to a very interesting talk on the new web services stuff on VS 2005, Christian Weyer is able enough to make even a discussion on XML serialization look captivating but unfortunately I had to leave because I had to record my GrokTalk,  anxiety attack aside, the 10 minutes passed like the wind and I had my minutes of fame at TechEd (well, sort of) and, hey, I'm still alive.