Well, I’ve been waiting for them to make this available ever since TechEd. They were giving copies away during the lunch session of the DotNetRocks show and since I left during the show I didn’t receive my copy. Since then I’ve been waiting for them to post it to MSDN downloads… like they promised. Well, as of July 15th they have fulfilled that promise. You can download a fully functional copy of VSTS Beta 2 fully configured and ready to test. Honestly I love this idea and...

Microsoft provided us (TechEd Attendees) with the first white papers on the new Office 12 XML file format standard. You can get more information at http://www.microsoft.com/of... This is a good move in my opinion. Take a look at the whitepaper which is available at the above link to get an idea of what they have in mind. There is some advanced opportunity here to get the jump on tools and utilities for the new Office 12 version so read away and get the wheels turning. Goodbye...

Listen, if you get a chance to hear Joel Pobar (CLR PM) talk make sure you do it. This guy knows his stuff. His cabana talk tonight focused on Reflection Best Practices. Cabana #6 was packed and for good reason. He took us deep into reflection, perf, CLR parsing of assembly meta-data and proper technique. Honestly, and this is just my opinion, I believe Joel is one of the most knowledgeable speakers I’ve had the pleasure to hear. If you want to know the inner workings of the CLR I believe this...

Some of us have been quoted over at the ftponline.com TechEd channel. Take a look here. Lets keep up the good work

So podcasting is something new for me and since the Microsoft Podcast crew has been flying around all week taping I decided to check the videos out. This page outlines how to get started watching the podcasts and the tools you need to do it. I downloaded the iPodder product and along with the TechEd XML feed on the page above it worked well. You can find out how to watch at http://www.microsoft.com/ev...

The site is still a little vague but Microsoft is offering a custom chopper as part of the “Cost Chopper Competition“ to the best SQL Server migration story. You can find the details at www.sqlserverchopper.com

Paul Flessner announced in his keynote this morning that a Community Technology Preview for BizTalk Server 2006 would be released today. I however cannot find a single link to it anywhere. When the Microsoft Pavilion opens at noon I'll go ask the BizTalk team where it is at and I'll report back to you

In Paul Flessners keynote this morning they announced the the official launch date for Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006. The products will launch the week of November 7th 2005. The official launch website can be found at msdn.microsoft.com/launch2005. Bookmark the site for important updates prior to and during the launch

First off, my camera sucks so the pictures aren't that great. I picked out the best ones and I'll upload more as the week moves on. Maybe I'll win the EMC prize and then I can do this right. Follow the flickr box to your left

I promised a number and here it is. There are 990 machines of one kind or another in the Hands-On Lab area. This was according to the MVP manning the main entrance this evening