MSDN Day - Great event

Thanks to Microsoft Ireland (and Clare !) for a brillant MSDN day.

Eric Rudder started by a speech where the main theme was innovation. I was seating at the front row and it's quite strange to think you face the 'maybe' future Bill Gates :-)

And we got some nice pictures of Eric, thanks to Marcus Mac Innes for the photographs. Check Marcus blog for more details

 
Photo: MIP

Nick Grattan, Microsoft Regional Director had a session on Asp.Net 2.0 with some cool demos. He used what I suspect a refresh version of the beta 1 and I was really impressed by the SQL 2005 Beta 2 using the new Sql Studio Manager (I am not sure if it's the exact name).

One very interesting demo was about building a web service inside SQL and called the method from Visual Studio. Nick showed that you don't need IIS installed on your SQL box, the only condition is to have Windoes Server 2003 because the code will use automatically http.sys.

Clare from Microsoft closed the session by officially announced and launched Ireland .Net Developers Alliance. I can say that the most awaited thing after a long day like that was the social event.

Of course we are in Dublin Ireland, so social gathering means a pub. I met there a lot of interesting developers and I hope they will join our user group very soon.

And this morning (ahh the joy of hangover) I was happy that we made today's Irish papers, the Examiner. Cool :-)