February 2007 Entries

Ok, so maybe it's not quite that dramatic, but I've gotten a lot of questions over the last month asking when the Orcas Feb CTP (now known as the March CTP) would be available. Well your waiting is over... the March CTP can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=cf76fcba-07af-47ac-8822-4ad346210670&displaylang=en&tm .

There is a tonne of new stuff from my team included in this release - things like the Entitiy Framework and Entitiy Data Model, LINQ to DataSet, LINQ to XML - all of the features that you have been reading about recently on the ADO.NET and XML team blogs. Check it out, and let us know what you think!

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Peter Chen, inventor of the Entity-Relationship model (ER model). Dr. Chen visited the Microsoft Campus to present a lecture sharing his thoughts on the ADO.NET Entity Framework and how it is related to his original vision of the Entity-Relationship model.

[Thank you for Alex Barnett and his blog for this information.] Dr. Chen's original paper on the Entity-Relationship model (ER model), published in 1976, is one of the most cited papers in the computer software field. During his visit, we heard how his ideas on the ER model were formulated some 30 years ago, and how the industry has put these theories into execution.

I just posted the first of these recordings, a podcast, on Channel 9. It's pretty interesting stuff.

Keep your eyes open as we make further recordings available, including a Channel 9 video, coming soon!

I was forwarded this post the other day about the processes that Microsoft (SQL Server in particular) uses for documentation and Books Online and it got me thinking. It really got me thinking about how I'd seen documentation (or lack there of) take place in other companies I've worked at, how I thought documentation took place at Microsoft before I was actually able to see the process (working in field sales), and how it actually takes place here in SQL.

I don't want to re-write the entire post, you can see it here, but I have to say the writers at MS are so much more involved with the development process than I originally thought, and it's kind of cool that customers can actually file bugs against the docs.