TechEd Europe about to kick off

We've touched down in Amsterdam, and tomorrow morning will see the start of TechEd Europe, Microsoft's premier European developer conference. 

Synchronized Blogging

Regarding coordinating the Ireland blogging, all my Tech-Ed based entries will be marked with a "TechEd Europe" category.  I'll write some articles that link to other Irish bloggers I know of.  Other Ireland-based bloggers: if you do the same, I understand the developers.ie folks will aggregate us all at teched.developers.ie.

Pre-Conference Tomorrow: SQL 2005 Tools for me

The pre-conference sessions are being hosted tomorrow, and I'll be attending the SQL Server 2005 Tools track.  That may sound funny coming from someone who has been gallavanting around Ireland giving SQL Server developer sessions.  But there are so many different perspectives from which one can view a database, and the one I've become increasingly conscious of is the decision-maker's view.  As in, "we have all this data here, but how can I extract the salient indicators that can help me make decisions?"  Hence the arsenal of tools that comes with SQL Server 2005, hence the track, and hence my decision to follow it tomorrow.

Other close runners-up for me were:

From Java to .NET in a Day: That's a path that I took myself about 5 years ago, but I'd say the process took longer than a day. 

Be Secure: How to Build a Defense-in-Depth Strategy for your Environment: More of an infrastructure talk than a developer one, but sure to be interesting.

Visual Basic .NET Programming for Visual Basic 6.0 Developers: Again, speaking of perspectives, I don't have a particularly strong VB6 upbringing, but a VB6 heritage is the one that many Irish devs bring to the .NET universe.  I'll be keen to hear what the important messages are from this session.

Hope to meet many of you this week!!