Richard Campbell Blogs Too

Scott Hanselman is, hands down, one of the most talented ASP.NET folks out there anywhere. And a phenomenal speaker. If you haven't listened to Hanselminutes before, do it NOW (okay, maybe after finishing reading this).

He's also a diabetic.

He's more articulate than I am about diabetes for no other reason than he's experienced it, so I hope you'll go read what he has to say if you need to understand more.

Me, I'm sold - diabetes needs to be beaten, I've made my contribution to Scott's goal of raising $50,000, and I hope you will too.

I had every intention of blogging through Tech Ed, but it didn't happen.

One week ago today (Monday), I was walking from my hotel room to Tech Ed in a really foul mood. Being grouchy is rather unusual for me, but you can ask Steve Forte and Cathi Gero, they were there, and boy, was I grouchy.

I guess its been a few years since I've done back-to-back conferences, having done the SDC conference in the Netherlands the previous week, my body was trying to tell me I should be at home by then.

All of this changed when I got on stage with Steve to do our Advanced Querying session.

Y'know, speaking at conferences is really a money losing proposition for the majority of speakers, myself included. I would be making more money staying at home and working. But its really, really fun. Really. Engaging a big group of people (and there was about 800 people in the room) is a challenge, its exciting, and when it goes well, you're in orbit for the rest of the day. And I think it went pretty well - lots of laughter and ooh-aahs.

So to my audience at my first session: THANKS! You made my week.

Some folks have been emailing me, unable to find the samples for the session. I've attached two files here, the first is the setup file which creates the sample tables.

Setup.sql (3.57 KB)

The second is the demo script itself with all the queries Steve and I showed.

SS2k-YukonSamples.sql (24.42 KB)

We got a ton of response on this session, and some cool new ideas for a new version next year.

My second session on Tuesday was the Profiler session, with my special guest Vipul Shah who jumped in to show off the cool new features of Profiler in SQL Server 2005. Its a cool session, but I think with Profiler 2005 coming, I'm going to have to rewrite it to really dig into the new capabilities of the tool.

As I explained in the session, my real focus on the Profiler session was to let developers know that things can happen to your queries between your code and SQL Server, and Profiler is really the only way to know. The big example I show is ADO 2.5 messing with a SELECT statement and stored procedure, wrapping them in cursors. I haven't found the same behaviour in ADO.NET, so I think the demo is getting moot.

I'm thinking next year I'll revise the session to make it more of a “Using Profiler as a Diagnostic Tool” type session.

On Wednesday Carl Franklin and I did .NET Rocks! in front of a live audience. I think there were close to a thousand people in the room, which was at the far end of the conference center. And I do mean the far end - I figured by the time we got there we'd walked to Cuba. We interviewed the Team System guys, I think the show went really well, it was fun to dig into more of the story behind Team System... and even better to have a bunch of fans watching the show!

Alas, my version of the standard DNR disclaimer (normally Geoff's domain) didn't make the cut of the show, but either way, a good listen.

Tech Ed may be over, but the Tech Ed Charity Auction isn't. 23 Tech Ed speakers, including me, are donating an hour of consulting time via phone, email or IM. You can bid on EBay at http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881. The auction ends on June 16, so bid soon, and bid often.

We were all affected by the tsunami that struck southern Asia, but my friend Julie Lerman really did something about it - she dropped everything and started working with an aid organization in Indonesia called AcehAid. She's pretty much done nothing else since, I don't know if she's eating, much less working.

Julie had a brainstorm to get a bunch of us consulting types together and auction off an hour of our time on eBay, all proceeds donated to AcehAid. My buddy Stephen Forte put out the call, wrangled us in and got the auction posted today. We've already gotten some pretty good press even before the auction was up.

So, here's the link to the auction - bid early, bid often!

Actually, I wouldn't mind getting an hour of these folks time, many of them are friends, and they're all so busy that actually get an hour to just talk to them is bloody difficult. For myself, I've been booked up with work for so many years, I haven't worked with a new client since 2001.