Started this morning early, packing up and checking out - Kent and I would fly out together this afternoon. I need to get back tonight because I leave on Saturday for Barcelona and Tech Ed Europe IT Forum.

First thing this morning was my second session with Kent, called Load Testing ASP.NET Applications for Performance and Scaling. Had some technical problems with the network, but I solved them on the fly while Kent did a soft-shoe number.

I use my big tank of a laptop, the Dell M90, to do this demo. I'm running two virtual machines at once: one has the load test environment on it, the other is the web server, databases, etc.

We dig into all the goodies around load testing - using perfmon, using WAST (old, but free) and Visual Studio for Testers (new, not free).

The 75 minutes tears by... there's so much to talk about in this space. But we get to run a few real tests along the way and talk about what their results mean.

As soon as the session was done I was running across the conference center again, this time to a RunAs Radio Live session with Chris Avis. Since RunAs Radio is only a half hour show, we actually recorded two separate topics, one on deployment, the other on spam management in Exchange.

When we were done there, I had a few minutes to rest before running off with Carl to do the DotNetNuke Futures Panel. All the senior folks from DotNetNukeCorp were on the panel talking about taking DotNetNuke to the next level. The reality is that DotNetNuke has gotten successful enough that it needs full time people just to manage the volunteers, much less dig into the less-cool stuff that needs to be built to make DotNetNuke fully viable in the enterprise space.

Carl and I sat at either end of the table, managed questions from the audience and generally kept things moving along. I'm sure it'll be a great .NET Rocks show when its published.

The moment the panel was done, I shook hands with everyone and ran - back to the speakers lounge to pick up Kent and head for the airport.

We had a little excitement at the airport with Kent's ticket (we flew Philippine Airlines home, it was the only thing that fit the schedule), but otherwise, the day went well.

And now I'm home. For like, 48 hours. Then its off to Barcelona!

And just like that, the tradeshow is over. Well, by the afternoon, anyway. I worked in the booth for the morning shift, but had to ditch after lunch to work with Kent on our first session of the conference: ASP.NET Scaling Strategies and Tactics. All these sessions are residuals of all the consulting and research we've done creating Strangeloop.

The session starts on the strategies of scaling first, and really there are only two: Specialization and Distribution. Most folks think only about distribution when they're scaling a web site, that is, adding more servers. But specialization not only plays a critical role, but should play it first. Specialization is all about breaking down your web application into smaller bits, whether it be separate SSL servers, image servers, etc.

Once you've done some specialization, distribution gets easier and more flexible.

That's the strategic part of the session, then we dig into the tactics, more of the details around what it takes to put those strategies into practice. For example, you can set up your own image servers to take the load off your ASP.NET servers, or can switch to a Content Delivery Network (like Akamai) to handle images. Most of the time, these tactics are specific to the application, ie, it depends.

When the session was over, I hustled across the conference center to do a .NET Rocks Live with Carl. Our guest - Kent Alstad. Since Kent was on the ASP.NET Scalability Panel back at Tech Ed in June, we've received a number of emails from folks asking for more... so we delivered. Since Kent was with us already, it was pretty easy.

We had a great crowd for the .NET Rocks Live, they really whooped it up. I'm sure you'll hear it when the show is published.

After that session I dropped into the Speaker Party for a couple of hours, up in the penthouse suites of The Hotel at Mandalay Bay. Waaay too many people in too small a space, incredibly loud and lots and lots of fun.

I didn't stay long though, I headed out to dinner at Sensi at the Bellagio with the Strangeloop folks and a few key influencers.

Tomorrow is another crazy busy day!

Today is tradeshow day... actually, its Microsoft day, the day when all the sessions are given by Microsoft folks. But its also the day where the tradeshow floor is open the most. DevConnections has an interesting technique for tradeshow floors where they close it regularly, then open it again an hour or so later.

While its a bit confusing, the logic is pretty straightforward: They close the tradeshow when sessions are on, which gives the folks working the tradeshow a break. Then they open it again for break times where there is snacks, lunch, etc. The result is that as a vendor, you get a chance to get off your feet regularly, and then you get these big surges of people visiting all at once.

Jeff and Paul from the Strangeloop sales team are loving it, the interest level is insanely high, every time the doors open to let the attendees in, we're swamped. We have eight staff for the booth including myself, and at times, its not enough.

Kent, Josh and I have been running the load test demos of the AS1000 back-to-back, keeping the cubes full. Lots and lots of questions about how things work and how to get one ASAP.

At the end of the day, the evening event is called Microsoft Unplugged, where Carl and I hosted a game show to give away all sorts of swag (my favorite job!).

Well, now I know why Jenn said she was pleased the rack was functional - apparently it took a serious fall. One wheel broken in half, two wheels bent, a huge dent in side... its a miracle the servers survived. I can't imagine what happened to the rack, I'm thinking it took a 6-10 foot fall.

However, everything in the rack is functional and the booth looks fantastic. It's the same design as the one we had at Interop in New York, but instead of having the columns and header wrapped in vinyl, all the surfaces are rigid panels with art on them.

Today was pre-con day at DevConnections, with full and half day workshops. Its ends with a dessert reception and the opening of the tradeshow floor for two hours.

Here's an odd shot of the booth, you can see the rigid panels with art work on them on the far column. Kent is doing a presentation. I definitely did not take enough pictures of the booth this time around.

For two hours, we were run off our feet - everyone is interested in Strangeloop and the AS1000. It was all we could do to hand out datasheets fast enough!

Its the day before DevConnections actually gets into full swing, Jenn and Trevor arrived yesterday afternoon, so they were in place and good to go.

DevExpress' presentations started at noon today, and around the same time I got an SMS from Jenn saying the demo rack has arrived - woohoo! Appears to be functional, they're doing testing now.

The DevExpress presentation started out with a hilarious demo - Sarah, who is a professional model, has had a small amount of training with Mark to use CodeRush to create a set of classes for Employee and Manager. The demo is a race between Dustin Campbell and Sarah, Dustin doesn't have code rush, but he can type really fast. But Sarah won - she coded the class faster than Dustin could. Its a very compelling demonstration of the productivity gains that CodeRush offers. DevExpress is doing the contest repeatedly in their booth at DevConnections.

Mark Miller got on stage today to show off the latest incarnation of Refactor Pro, they're planning on having 150 refactorings by the end of the year. There's a free version that comes with Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, but the Pro edition is $99. And as Mark says, that's only 67 cents a refactoring. Heck of a deal, and an incredible product.

Its so much fun to watch Mark use CodeRush - it makes Visual Studio an extension of his crazy mind. He codes incredibly fast while touring us through the features of Refactor Pro.

Had a slow, lazy morning today, since the DevExpress meetings didn't start until noon (gotta love that).

Wandered from the hotel part of the Mandalay Bay all the way to the South Convention Center, which is most of the way to Utah. The DevExpress event is in one room on the third floor, which means its a hundred feet up, since the ceilings in the Convention Center are at least 40 feet high.

Most of DevExpress is here too, including Ray (CEO), Julian (CTO), Mark (Chief Scientist), Dustin, Kevin, Courtney and a whole host of developers. Its impressive to meet the team like this, and its obvious they're very, very proud of their software.

Today we're primarily focused on their newest products, including controls for WPF and Silverlight. Apparently much of what we've seen will be on display at DevConnections as well.

Kent is here with me and he's thinking hard about how Strangeloop and DevExpress could work together. What if some of the DevExpress controls were AS1000 sensitive, and knew how to automatically take advantage of it being there?

I've flown into Las Vegas for DevConnections a couple of days early to hang with the DevExpress folks. DevExpress has invited a small group of folks to show off their latest incarnation of all their products.

Kent Alstad has come along with me as well, we're going to be doing some presentations at DevConnections together, as well as working hard in the Strangeloop booth.

We shipped the demo rack directly from Interop in New York to here, supposedly it'll arrive on Sunday. Jenn and Trevor are handling set up for the booth, but I'm sure I'll drop by during the set up.

Not much actually happened today, the flight was uneventful (and direct), and DevExpress supplied a limo to get us to the Mandalay Bay, so we could bypass the inevitably massive taxi line at the airport.

We met up with some of the DevExpess folks for dinner tonight and got a few hints of what we'd see tomorrow... I guess we'll see tomorrow!

And then suddenly, its over.

The tradeshow at Interop is only two days: Wednesday and Thursday. Each day the booth was open for six and a half hours. Doesn't seem like much.

So why am I so tired?

We talked to a lot of folks at Interop about Strangeloop - almost all were IT and/or network folks. Some had no ASP.NET or no web site at all, so there wasn't much to talk about. But many more were very conscious of the fact that they had challenges with performance and scaling of their web sites.

One of my favorite visits was a fellow who said "I'm not responsible for the web site, but my boss needs to know about this" after seeing the entire demonstration. He took a data sheet and all sorts of info. Half an hour later he was back with his boss in tow and I did the whole pitch again. At the end his boss looked at him and said "you've got their info? Good."

Its a great feeling, being in the right place at the right time. And that seems to be the reaction of the majority of folks we talked to at Interop.

As soon as the show was over the booth came down. Amazing how quickly it came apart, considering how long it took to set up. The server rack was packed up for shipping in no time. I grabbed one of the big banners to take back to the office in Vancouver.

Tomorrow I head home for about a week, then Las Vegas for DevConnections!

Not much to say about Day 1 and 2 of Interop - we were too busy getting ready for the tradeshow to get to see any sessions at all.

Our booth design for Interop uses a 20x20 island, we're right beside Riverbed. The booth itself has two columns kitty-corner from each other, supporting a central span. This cuts the booth in half. On one side is the reception counter with scanners, documents, etc. The other half is the presentation area, where we have a small podium, a big screen and a bunch of cubes to sit on.

This photo is during set up on Tuesday... things are just about finished. You can see the server rack on the right in one of the columns. Its controlled by the laptop on the podium - this is where we do the live demonstrations of the AS1000. On the other side of that column and on both sides of the other column are demo stations for showing how the AS1000 works.

Folks really like this booth design, I'm thrilled with it. Lots of other vendors were coming over and taking pictures of it. I feel like we really utilized our space well, the live demo packs people in, and when they have more questions they can move over to the other demo stations to get answers.

We're doing three demos on the live station at Interop. One is done by Stephen Forte, the CTO of Corzen. He's talking about how the challenges of Corzen's business in rolling out new features quickly and constantly to their customers. Spending time on optimization is just not an option, they're looking to the AS1000 to minimize that concern.

Kent and I are also doing demonstrations, using Visual Studio for Testers to do load tests against the rack with and without the AS1000 to demonstrate how it improves performance and scalability.

Carl Franklin is here as well and is video taping the demonstrations so that we can put them up on the Strangeloop site for future viewing.

Carl and I grabbed an interview with Dino Esposito in a quiet room during the conference, his viewpoint on Silverlight and ASP.NET technologies is always interesting.

Dino's session on "What Partial Rendering is not AJAX" rang true for me as well - his point is that the essence of AJAX is pushing page rendering to the browser, rather than computing it on the server. But partial rendering still computes the HTML on the server and sends it to the browser to display. This undermines the goal of AJAX.

I had last session of the day (and conference) and a huge crowd for my load testing talk today, as usual there were relatively few folks in the audience that had done load testing before, so a lot of my talk focused on the fundamentals of why and where for load testing. The data we've gathered around Strangeloop is great stuff for getting people started.

Sold out! Yep, the show is packed. Its not the biggest show in the world, but the attendees are focused and excited to be here. The keynote speech today included the local Microsoft folks and Telerik and, of course, Tim Huckaby! Tim's stories around building great applications that change the world are hard to touch. The audience was spellbound.

My work came in the afternoon, I took the Scaling Habits of ASP.NET Applications out for a spin again, with lots of interesting questions and discussion afterward.

In the evening Carl and I ran a panel discussion on WPF with Tim Huckaby, Brian Noyes and Todd Anglin.

Tomorrow is the last day, then we're touring Sofia!

Less than a week at home and I'm back in Europe, now in Sofia, Bulgaria for DevReach.

This is the second year of this conference, this time around Telerik is very deeply involved. I've been helping out with bringing in speakers, including Stephen Forte, Tim Huckaby and Joel Semeniuk.

And yes, this time Carl has made it here in one piece. No more travel disasters for him!

One of the great things about the SDC conference is the Speakers Tour. The conference has always been a Monday-Tuesday show, followed on Wednesday by the organizers taking all the speakers out on a tour of the Netherlands.

In ten years, we've done all sorts of things - explored Rotterdam, the waterfront, tulip gardens, gone go-kart racing, paintballing... you name it.

This year was different again for everyone in general, but especially me.

Instead of actually touring around, the tour brought everyone to the seaside. Because of the fall date, the weather is much more pleasant by the sea, although rather windy. We worked from a base location of a restaurant on the beach. There were a number of things going on around the restaurant, including kite flying and various other games. After lunch all the speakers, spouses and crew took bikes to the storm management and water control works. Much of the Netherlands is below sea level, so the Dutch take management of the sea very, very seriously.

But I didn't do any of the tour activities... I was making dinner!

Remi Caron, my friend and one of the conference organizers, approached me a few weeks ago asking if I thought it would be fun to cook for the conference. So the two of us took on the task. We had access to the restaurant for doing the cooking, including some huge grills. We're cooking for about 50 people.

We spent the morning shopping, buying all the supplies for the meal, which included ribs, burgers and salmon. I usually blend pork and beef together when I make burgers, I was surprised to find that butchers in the Netherlands regularly stock such mixtures, so it was pretty easy to get those things together.

We made a number of salads as well, and bought dessert - cleaned out a nice little bakery of all its pastries.

The afternoon was spent in prep work, making salads, burgers, preparing buns, and so on.

Then, when everyone left on the bikes, we started cooking. Burgers went first because they can keep, followed by ribs. Remi prepared the ribs restaurant style, having boiled them with spices and flavors during the day, they just needed grilling and glazing. The salmon went last, which was a combined effort - Remi's spices, my cooking technique of cooking whole, on foil, one turn... just to medium. The trick to great fish is not overcooking it.

In the end, we had too much of everything, but that's to be expected, really. It was fun to make rather North American food for Europeans, all the ingredients are available, they just don't normally cook like that. The guy who owned the restaurant asked Remi and I if we were available next summer for work.

And the SDC folks gave me an iPod Nano as a thank you present!

Now I'm off to Prague... going to drive across Germany on the autobahn and back again. Good fun.

So Mark, Karen and I managed to put together something Mondays-like last night. Not exactly a Mondays without Carl, but close enough. Without any recording gear, its going to disappear into history. The SDC folks seemed to enjoy it, lots of laughs.

Just to make it more exciting, I participated in the DotNetNuke Futures Panel right before Mondays. We had originally intended to make the panel discussion into a .NET Rocks show, but without recording gear, that couldn't happen. There's going to be another panel like this at DevConnections in Las Vegas, we'll see if we can't record that one for .NET Rocks instead. If you haven't been paying attention, DotNetNuke is going through a major reorganization as it becomes one of the larger Open Source projects in the world. SDC is hosting the Open Force Europe conference, so folks here are learning what the reorganization means to them.

Today I was even busier - my famous SQL Tips & Tricks session first thing in the morning, then Load Testing with Kent Alstad (more great content generated by our work on Strangeloop) before lunch and then closing the conference in the last slot with Steve Forte doing a SQL Server Q&A session. We left the content of the Q&A session largely open, the attendees were very interested in SQL 2008. Fortunately, Steve and I disagree on a number of features, so it was, shall we say, an "animated conversation."

Tomorrow is the speaker's tour, which will have a number of new twists!

The SDC conference is starting, and Carl is not here.

Some sort of travel disaster has happened for Carl, resulting in him losing some baggage and being unable to travel until he gets it back.

This seriously complicates doing Mondays tonight, since he had the recording gear, as well as having to cover off his sessions.

And we're not going to get any .NET Rocks shows either - which is a shame, we had some cool stuff planned to do here.

But that's how it goes sometimes. My schedule is plenty full doing all sorts of scaling and performance sessions with Kent Alstad. So far we've done the Scaling Habits of ASP.NET Applications and ASP.NET Scaling Strategies and Tactics. Tomorrow we'll get to take a new session out for a spin - Load Testing!

All these new sessions have really come about because of the research we're doing at Strangeloop Networks. Building an appliance to accelerate ASP.NET applications means running lots and lots of tests. The result of which is a huge pile of performance data. My head is stuffed full of so many stats and details on how ASP.NET applications scale that I figure I might as well share it with everyone.

On the road again, this time in the Netherlands for SDC.

This is the tenth year I've done this conference, but the first time I've been in the Netherlands in the fall - in previous years this conference has been in the spring (typically in May).

The weather in September in the Netherlands is awesome. Its warm, occasionally cloudy... we might get some rain this week, but for the most part its been awesome.

Last year the whole family came along and we also went to Paris. This year I'm traveling with a buddy, and we're planning on driving across Germany to Prague after the conference. Roadtrip!

Back in New York again! I've lost count of the number of times I've been in New York this year.

This time the event is Sleepless in New York, Infusion's weekend of Sharepoint madness. The event is actually being held in Microsoft's New York office on the Avenue of the Americas and 52nd Street, just a few blocks from Central Park.

On .NET Rocks, Carl and I only announced Sleepless a few times, as an opportunity for folks to compete to win prizes by learning about Sharepoint and then building an application, all in a weekend. The number of contestants was quickly overwhelming and we had to close registration early.

The result was an amazing group of twelve contestants - people from all over North America, brought in for a weekend in New York and all the Sharepoint they can stand.

Some folks from the Sharepoint team in Redmond are here as well, Carl and I are taking everything in.

After spending a week in New York, we hopped on the Amtrak and headed for New London in time for Carl's 40th birthday party.

We're staying in a cool older hotel near the seaside on the edge of New London.

Carl's party was, of course, totally over the top. He held it at his home, and had an entire barbeque pig brought in for dinner. All sorts of interesting folks, including Kim Tripp, Paul Randal, Scott Hanselman and Miguel Castro attended.

After the party, we headed over to the studio to record Mondays. This time we had an audience, most of the folks from the party came to listen. To record a Mondays together we all have to be stuffed into audio isolation booths. There are three in the studio - a pair in the main room that face each other and one across the hall. Mark and Karen were in the pair, so they could see each other. I was in the booth across the hall, so it was almost like being back home in that I couldn't see anyone, just hear them through the headphones.

Carl was in the main studio room with the audience, which is why he's able to interact with them.

Recording the show was hilarious, not only did we have good bits, but the general chaos of having everyone there just kicked everything up a notch.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Calgary to do my SQL Querying presentation for the Calgary .NET Users Group. While there, John Bristowe interviewed me. That interview is now posted.

Actually, its really three separate interviews. The first starts off as a short history of my career in computers (30 years this August), how I got into .NET Rocks and RunAs Radio, speaking about SQL Server and my Querying Talk. After that we jumped into Strangeloop, what its about and where it came from. Finally, we ended up talking career advice... John asked me my thoughts on how developers can grow in their jobs.

I'd go on, but its probably best just to listen to the interview, its about a half hour long.

Blame Michele Leroux Bustamante for this one - she talked me into coming down to do a couple of presentations at the SoCal Code Camp.

I did my Querying Talk again, but also took The Scaling Habits of ASP.NET out for a spin for the first time since the Vancouver TechFest.

Scaling Habits is a fun talk for me because it really is a tour through the evolution of an ASP.NET application - from those early days where you're one guy with a clever idea for a web app, through to what it takes to run a large scale site with multiple servers and the related bureaucracy for operating it.

Along the way I talk about the elements of the evolving site - how much traffic is typical, the kinds of metrics that matter, and so on. And most importantly, what it takes to move to the next level of evolution for the application.

At the core of this whole concept is the idea of the Performance Equation.

A quick description of each factor in the performance equation:

Now I can't take credit for this equation, I did not invent it. The original one comes from the "Field Guide to Application Delivery Systems" by Peter Sevcik and Rebecca Wetzel from NetForecast. However, I did make one change to it - the original equation does not account for simultaneous downloading of resource files and the base overhead of the page file itself. That is represented by the separate addition of an RTT and dividing the rest of the AppTurns by the number of concurrent requests.

So all of these factors go into the time it takes for a web page to fully render on your web browser after you request it.

When I display the equation to an audience, I always ask the question: "What part do you work on?" When I'm talking to ASP.NET developers, invariably the answer is Cs - Compute time on the server. After all, that's the code you wrote. But if you don't know what Cs is in relation to all the other factors of the equation, how do you know if that's the right thing to work on?

Some other interesting issues I've run into once I started looking at web performance this way:

• In many cases bandwidth is just not the issue, we have lots. But when it *is* an issue, often we don't test with the same bandwidth that the customer has, so we don't realize when bandwidth is a problem.
• Round Trip Time is the ping time between the customer and the server. Again, since we often test with servers that are so close to us that the ping time is ultra-low, we don't have test conditions that match with our customers. Its amazing how huge a factor bad RTT can be for performance.
• AppTurns of course exacerbate RTT times, because its a multiplier - if you have a dozen JS files, a dozen CSS files and thirty images (which is remarkably common), you're talking about over 50 AppTurns, and even divided by Concurrent Requests, that expands response time by lots of seconds.
• Normally, with Internet Explorer and FireFox, the number of Concurrent Requests is four. It can be adjusted at the client computer, but its very rarely done. It is possible to do a trick with URI renaming where each resource appears to come from a separate server so that you can fool the web browsers into doing more than four concurrent requests.
• Compute time on the client becomes a significant issue when you get heavy with the Javascript, most often seen with AJAX-style pages. In my opinion, getting the browser more involved in generating a web page is a good idea, but you need to account for the cost involved. If you're only looking at server compute times, then of course AJAX looks like a brilliant solution - because you've hidden the cost.

Now that's not to say that Compute Time on the Server isn't important to the equation - it *might* be. But you should know for sure before you pour your time into improving it. Going through the exercise of breaking down where the total response time goes is a critical first step to making sure your effort is going to the right place.

Thanks again to all the folks at the SoCal Code Camp - I had a fantastic time, I'd love to come down again!

I dropped into the Calgary .NET User Group to do my famous SQL Query Tips & Techniques session. John Bristowe was nice enough to put me up for the night, but not before he got an interview out of me.

I've done the querying talk for a number of years now, and I update it regularly. I promised the folks there that I'd make the code available, so I've attached it with all the latest stuff, including my exploration of running totals.

Had a great time, a fun crowd to talk to... I'll have to bring the Strangeloop gear out there once we're ready for a road show and let 'em see what we've been up to.

Here's the sample code, including the script to build the database:

So I get home from a busy day of reviewing patents for Strangeloop to discover a voice mail message.

When I play back the message, it sounds like 800 people shouting into a cell phone "Where's Richard?!?"

Stephen Forte cracks me up.

Sorry I'm not there, folks.

By the way, my passport did show up on Monday. Turns out the consul did what he said he would do and issued the visa on June 12.

But it looks like it wasn't picked up until June 15, and even then, it was a drop off at the UPS Store, rather than a pick up. So it must have sat in an outbox for three days.

Ooops.

Right now I'm supposed to be on an airplane, flying to New York, on my way to Lahore and Karachi, in Pakistan, for the Pakistan Developers Conference.

But I'm not. I'm still at home. The reason? No passport.

To travel to Pakistan, especially to speak at a conference, you need a visa. And the only way for me to get a visa is to send my passport to the Pakistan Consulate in Ottawa. Its supposed to take three business days to get a visa.

With overnight courier, that's an entire week without my passport. Which may not sound like much to you, but to me, its very challenging to schedule... I use my passport a lot, especially during spring conference season.

So I called the consulate in advance and let them know the situation: That I was going to be in the United States (for TechEd), but as soon as I got back, I'd overnight the paperwork to them. They said if I included a letter of explanation about my urgency, they would expedite the visa.

Well, something has gone wrong - because I don't have my passport back. And I'm supposed to be on a plane now.

I've let the conference organizers know, and I talked to Steve about it, he's going to cover some of my material, so hopefully the attendees will get all the content.

But I'm pretty disappointed. This is my second trip to Pakistan, first time to Lahore, and I was really looking forward to it. The attendees are always so enthusiastic, its really a pleasure to be there.

I expect my passport will arrive on Monday now, too late to do anything about the conference.

Bummer.

We weren't too late last night, so getting up the next morning wasn't all that tough. Got to the Fish Bowl early, the first heat of Speaker Idol was at 9:45am. I spent a lot of the morning in email exchanges with folks for the three panels: Identity, VSTS and ASP.NET Scalability. I realized the stage is best set up for four panelists, each with headsets, plus Carl and I sitting off to the side with our own headsets, and then there's one wireless wand microphone on the floor.

In between panel emails there are emails from nervous Speaker Idol contestants, confirming rules, asking for suggestions, and so on.

Ten minutes before Heat 1 begins, we realize not all the judges can make it. I pulled Chris Kinsman in to cover for Joel who had a session.

Good news is, all the contestants show up. And then a big crowd shows up, over a hundred people. The AV guys are awesome, get everyone geared up and things moves right along. The competitors for the first heat were Mike Azocar, Bill Baldasti and Bob Roudebush. Going last was Kent Alstad, our first wild card. All the presentations are excellent, the judges complain about having to pick a winner, but do their job. The first heat winner is selected: its Bob Roudebush, with his great demonstration of the File Server Resource Manager in Windows Server 2003 R2.

At the end of Heat 1, the wildcard slots quickly disappeared. My four wild cards, in order of the heats, are Kent Alstad, Mark Miller, Rob Windsor and Steve Smith.

When the heat is over, I change shirts and head for the Strangeloop booth which has just opened. Lee is there now, arriving late last night. Things are in full swing, lots of people visiting the booth, seeing the demo, taking data sheets and getting excited about what we're up to. During that time the judges for the Best of Tech Ed competition came by to see AppScaler. We were very excited to be a Finalist, and the judge seemed to "get" what AppScaler was all about.

After helping out for a couple of hours I headed back to the Fish Bowl to gear up for Speaker Idol Heat 2 and continue sorting out who and when for the .NET Rocks panels. Change back to the DNR shirt.

Speaker Idol Heat 2 goes even smoother. The contestants are Brad McGehee, Alain Tadros, Dandy Weyn and the wild card, none other than Mark Miller (who knew he'd never presented at Tech Ed?). Again, the presentations are killer effective. Its amazing how much information these guys can pack into five minutes. The judges rule and Alain Tadros wins with a great code-on-the-fly demo of anonymous delegates.

I spent the rest of the afternoon locking down the panels, sending out invites. We'd have two panels on Wednesday, in between the Speaker Idol heats. First would be the ASP.NET Scalability panel, then the VSTS panel. On Thursday morning we'd do the Identity panel and the Speaker Idol finals. With the details locked down, I fired off the scheduling info to the CommNet folks to get it posted out to the Tech Ed attendees.

In the midst of all this, Greg Hughes arrived. Greg has been my co-host on RunAs Radio from the very beginning of the show, but this was the first time we'd actually met face to face. Our goal for RunAs was to get four interviews recorded with interesting folks at Tech Ed. We debated topics for awhile, but the list tightened up to IIS7, Network Access Protection, Forefront/ISA, Server Virtualization, Cardspace/Identity and anything else Longhorn Server we could find.

As the afternoon wound down, Carl and I rip out the Wednesday morning bluecast message. The mission turns to finding a good dinner. Orlando restaurants are plentiful, but mediocre for the most part. I guess its the nature of the place... its a total tourist town, and there really isn't any penalty for having a lousy restaurant, people keep showing up.

But we were told by numerous folks in the know that Vitos Chop House was the place to go. So we went. Greg, Mark Dunn, Carl & Tina and I all headed over there for a big steak dinner. Lo and behold, sitting a couple of tables away was the entire DevExpress gang, including Mark Miller! The dinner was good (when you're in a town of one star restaurants, being a three star makes you a knock out), and ultimately Mark came and sat with us as well. Lots of laughter and silliness. Our noise attracts attention, Chris Kinsman finds us from the other end of the restaurant.

We split up from dinner. Carl head for The Groove to jam. Mark Miller and I adjourn to the hotel bar to talk for awhile (I drank, Mark doesn't need alcohol). In bed shortly after midnight. Tomorrow is the half way mark!

When I got into the Rosen yesterday evening, I discovered that the server box had arrived from Denver. I left it at the bell desk, since there was no reason to drag it up to the room. But since I'd chatted with Birgit and Virginia that evening, we agreed to meet in the morning, get the beastie over to the tradeshow and set up. Jon, Josh and Kent were also arriving today.

I had wisely stocked myself up with bottles of water when I was over at Tech Ed registering, so I could deal with the after affects of significant amounts of scotch consumed the night before. Tech Ed is the Super Bowl of Microsoft Conferences, and you don't want to miss a bit of it. So its up late partying every night, and up early the next morning to get to work.

So we all gathered at the Strangeloop booth, reviewed the demos and went over procedures in general. I also had my box of shirts.

My life for this Tech Ed is a complex one. I have a lot of shirts, and depending on what work I'm doing, I have to change shirts. I have the following shirts:

• Tech Ed Speaker Shirt (for speaking, duh!)
• .NET Rocks Shirt (all DNR related events)
• Strangeloop Shirt (whenever I'm going to be at the booth)

So over the course of the day, I'm going to switch between these shirts several times. I wear a t-shirt underneath to avoid horrifying anyone. And where do I do all this quick change work? Why, in the Fish Bowl!

After checking in at the Strangeloop booth, I headed over to the Virtual Tech Ed stage, where The 64 Bit Question, Speaker Idol and all the .NET Rocks panels were going to take place. In behind the stage is a video recording studio and an editing room, each of which have two walls of plexiglass. They look like people aquariums, and were quickly dubbed The Fish Bowl. And that's when I finally met Zaak and Katrina in person. Zaak runs Virtual Tech Ed, and we'd been on the phone with each other at least once a week for the past two months. The Virtual Tech Ed stage was the fruition of all the work we'd been doing.

Carl and I took over one corner of the Fish Bowl and met a number of the other inhabitants, including Dean Andrews, who was working with a group of folks who do Bluecasting. Bluecasting utilizes Bluetooth technology to push content (in this case, MP3 files) onto Bluetooth devices, like cell phones. Dean wanted to make it easy for people to find out what was available on the Virtual Tech Ed web site. After talking to him for a few minutes I offered up the services of Carl and I. We have lots of practice making short bits (2-3 minutes) with music and news. We planned to create one for every day of the conference.

It was around that time that Steve Forte and Pat Hynds showed up. Pat and Duane Laflotte had a conference session on Identity right after lunch, and they had an idea. Since fundamentally Identity is all about how you know who someone is, they wanted to do a physical demonstration. So Pat and Duane asked Steve and I to impersonate them. We would show up early for the session, walk up on stage and start presenting it. Steve went so far as to grab a piece of paper and scrawl "Patrick Hynds" on it and stuff it in front of his own Tempo Tempo Forte Forte name tag.

When the time came, Steve and I went on stage and dropped into our usual pre-session duet banter, only calling each other Pat and Duane. When it was actually time to start, we introduced ourselves and started the session. I even made a point of fumbling over the pronunciation of Duane's last name. About two minutes into it, Pat and Duane rush in, apologize for being late, and say "what are you guys doing on stage?" We get into an argument about who is really supposed to be presenting the session. Pat had left his badge on the podium, so he picks it up and puts it on. Steve runs into the crowd and asks an attendee, "doesn't my badge say Patrick Hynds" which of course it does, in badly scrawled pen. Then Pat says "But I'm Patrick Hynds, I have the official badge!" and someone else from the audience yells out "He just picked that badge up from the podium!"

So then we held a poll, asking the audience who they thought the real Patrick Hynds was. And most people picked Steve! Then we flipped the slide and showed photos along side the names. The crowd laughed. That was mine and Steve's cue to get out of the way, and Patrick dropped directly into "How DO you know for certain who someone is?"

The gag worked, and it made a point about Identity. Mission accomplished. Back to the floor, visited the Developer Learning Center area and chatted with Erika Maki about putting together some panels for .NET Rocks. She suggested VSTS, which I thought was a fine idea. Next stop, the RD booth where Steve stayed and ultimately I ended up back at the Fish Bowl.

While I was off being silly on stage, Carl was working hard on getting The 64 Bit Question slide deck finalized. We had pulled all the prizes together and sorted out the questions into Developer, IT Pro and .NET Rocks Trivia categories. The swag was wide ranging: from polar fleece sweaters to USB keys to software packages from Telerik, Data Dynamics and DevExpress. While we were comparing notes and organizing that, I had sent out an email to all of the Speaker Idol contestants to meet at the Virtual Tech Ed stage for a briefing. I was also starting to pull together the various panel ideas we had, including a panel on Identity and a panel on ASP.NET Scaling. Lots and lots of emails.

Speaker Idol briefing went well, but on such short notice, only about half the contestants showed up. The judges (Steve, Kate, Michele and Joel) dropped by as well. We talked about the flow of the stage, how all laptops are prepped in advance as well as mike checks. The routine on stage itself: Carl and I introduce you, ask you a bit about yourself, then get off the stage so you can do your five minute presentation. When you're done, we all clap, Carl and I return to the stage, talk to the judges a bit, they offer their critique, and the next contestant comes up. When all the contestants are done, they all return to the stage and the judges pick a winner. We also talked about wildcard participants - there are three contestants per heat, selected in advance. But there's room for four in each heat, so someone watching a heat can come up afterward and we'll put them into the next heat. I had already found a wild card for the first heat, I figured the rest would go quickly.

At 6pm Carl and I started The 64 Bit Question, just as folks were headed down for the opening of the sponsor booths. We drew a big crowd, mostly IT folks (wish we had more IT questions), and the swag went quickly. Some of the questions are quite funny, and the audience has a good time. After an hour or so, all the goodies are given out and we can head over to the Strangeloop booth.

So count the shirt changes: in the morning I arrived in a civilian shirt. By noon I changed to a speaker shirt for the Identity gag. Then I changed to the DNR shirt for the Speaker Idol briefing and 64 Bit Question. Then into the Strangeloop shirt to help out at the booth. Finally I switched back to the civ shirt as the reception ended and we could go to dinner. Somewhere in all that, Kent arrived as well. Before heading out Carl and I ducked into the Fish Bowl for awhile and laid down the Tuesday Bluecast recording. After that we ate at Jacks in the Rosen Plaza hotel. We were underwhelmed with the food, but the company was good - Strangeloopers (Jon, Josh, Kent, Virginia and Birgit) plus Steve and Carl.

Sometime in the afternoon I discovered that Scott Hanselman had blogged about the blogging session he'd contributed so much to (he asked me for my notes so that he could). Its at http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BlogInteresting32WaysToKeepYourBlogFromSucking.aspx

Tomorrow would be the first heats of Speaker Idol, and things would really get moving!

Today I discovered I'm in the wrong Rosen. The Rosen Center is the speaker hotel, the Rosen Plaza is just another hotel. The conference center beside the hotel is the wrong conference center, Tech Ed is held across the street from the Rosen Center. Its only a couple of blocks away, which translates into a mile-plus walk in the steaming swamp heat that is Orlando.

Woke up early and headed for the Peabody Hotel, more or less across the street. The Regional Director (RD) Summit meeting was being held there, Tech Eds are the usual place you'll find a concentration of RDs. RD Summits are comprised typically of three things:

• Insider discussions with Microsoft where they brief us on NDA stuff that will be coming in the future (such as announcements at Tech Ed)
• Interactive discussions with teams around products in earlier stages of development (stuff that is really, really NDA)
• RD specific tasks, like direction of the program, awards, stuff like that

The pack of RDs this year wasn't the biggest, with many trickling in over the course of the day. Sunday is also pre-con day for Tech Ed, and RDs are prone to pre-cons... Kim Tripp, Tim Huckaby and Kate Gregory were all doing pre-cons. Steve Forte, Carl Franklin and Scott Golightly showed up noonish.

I was there early, but that's because I was worried - I had foolishly agreed to give a talk to the RDs. A talk on blogging. This is a problem for two reasons.

1. I am only a marginally effective blogger.
2. Giving a presentation to Regional Directors is a worse-case scenario for any presenter.

So, how to deal with these two issues.

The RD Manager at the moment, Kim Sanchez (Kevin Schuler is on leave), asked me if I would put together a talk on ideas around being a more effective blogger. One of the anchor points of The Region, the new Regional Director web site, is a feed from the blogs of the RDs. The goal of the talk was to help the RDs to know how to be more effective at blogging - not that they're bad bloggers, but we can always get better. My response was "Why me? Ask Scott Hanselman, he's the master blogger of the RDs." Unfortunately, Scott wasn't coming to Tech Ed.

So I did the next best thing: I asked Scott to talk to me about blogging. I put on my head set, opened up One Note and then typed as fast as I could for about two hours.

Its not that I didn't have my own ideas about blogging. Its just that Scott thinks so much about it and brain dumps so quickly, it seemed silly to start anywhere else. At the end of two hours, my brain and fingers were sore, but I had a heck of a start on a talk. Then I spent some time gathering some other viewpoints, pulling together some links, and presto-change-o, I had a talk. Which brings us to issue #2: presenting it to the RDs.

Many of the best speakers you've ever seen at any conference ever are Regional Directors. And there they are, watching me. And I'm not this great blogger, I've researched the topic, but fundamentally, I'm a hypocrite advocating things like using FeedBurner and URL rewriting when I'm not using them (but I will start soon, I promise!). I wanted to convey the fact that I'm just the messenger and I know I'm full of crap... which gave me an idea. I pitched it to Kim, and she agreed to supply rubber dog poop. So just before I went up to present the blogging talk, a couple of plastic bags containing rubber dog poop were placed on each table. My theory was, if I was full of crap, they could throw them at me.

Richard Hundhausen immediately complied and I caught my first poop. So far so good. The presentation went well, with several RDs that are into blogging engaging in lively debate. I should point out that an RD Summit is really a gathering of friends who don't get to see each other all that often. And like most groups of friends who rarely get together, they love to grind on each other. So the debate was really lively, which was good for me, since that meant they were grinding on each other, rather than me.

My real mistake was not considering that we scheduled the blogging talk over lunch, which is not the most appetizing time to have rubber dog poop on the table. On the other hand, a number of poops immediately went missing and were put to work in harassment missions on the MVP Summit next door.

No, I'm not going to go through my blogging talk in detail: I'll let Scott do that. He asked for my notes, so I sent them over, he planned to blog about it some time soon.

Shortly after that Steve Forte arrived and I decided I needed to get out of the room for awhile... I was more nervous than I thought! So I took the opportunity to take a walk, discover I was at the wrong Rosen hotel, figure out which conference center Tech Ed was in and get registered.

This year I'm registered as Staff, rather than a Speaker. This is really, really useful for me, since it makes it very easy to get in and out of almost anything at Tech Ed when I'm trying to find a guest or record a show for .NET Rocks. Stevie registered at the same time, but for some reason his badge said Stephen Forte Forte. When I saw Forte Forte, I immediately said "Tempo Tempo!" which connects to a long running story about some hot Turkish pop stars . And Stevie's reaction to that when they offered to fix his badge was to get it changed to Tempo Tempo Forte Forte. They agreed, and he was pleased.

From the registration area we wandered over to the sponsors' booths to check out the Strangeloop booth. It looked awesome, even not entirely set up.

After that it was time for speaker check-in with the speaker boss, Lynn Edwards. Stephen and I walked into the Speaker Room and immediately dropped to our knees and went prostrate in our standard response to being before Lynn... "We are NOT WORTHY!" It makes Lynn happy. We got our speaker shirts and headed back for the Peabody in time for the group photo.

The group photo this year was taken out on the pool deck, and took longer than usual because we waited for Tim Huckaby and Kate Gregory to show up... they kept calling as they ran from the conference center back to the Peabody to be in the photo. In total, there were about 35 RDs in the picture.

Then it was time to head back down to the summit room for the awards portion of the day. The RD Program gives out bronze, silver and gold awards based on your reach. I won gold again this year along with about a dozen other RDs. The final award given out is RD of the Year, and this year it went to... none other than Carl Franklin! A fine standing ovation was given. I think Carl was quite surprised.

The awards ended and we all loaded into a bus to head to the RD Party at Tu Tu Tango. Its an interesting place, vaguely resembling the Spanish Tapas Bars of Barcelona. There's occasionally a flamenco performance, and lots of little tasty plates of food. But for the most part, the RDs do what the RDs always want to do when they're together - they talked. Endlessly. And drank.

After three hours or so the party was winding up so it was time to move onto another party, this one the Party with Palermo! Jeff Palermo is a friend of the show, Iraqi vet and one of the nHibernate Mafia out of Austin. And he throws these really great parties at conferences. The last one was at the MVP Summit. This one was at the Glo Lounge, and about 450 people showed up. .NET Rocks! also sponsored the party, so Carl and I were greeted with plenty of cheers when we arrived. More talking and drinking ensued. At the party Carl met an old friend of his named Tina. Tina and Carl met waaaay back when Carl was living in Orlando, going to audio engineering school. Tina is a charmer, she fit in with our unruly mob just fine.

Eventually even the Party with Palermo was winding down, somewhere around midnight. But we weren't done yet, so we gathered up and headed back to the Rosen Plaza for more drinks. Our group ended up being Stephen Forte, Chris Menegay, Carl & Tina and our new friend Arthur (another blue badge pitching in with the RD program) and April (who works with the MVP program). At some point during the Party with Palermo Steve and Arthur had entered into a competition to get the most compromising photograph of themselves with a woman they had just met. This meant that Steve and Arthur were constantly flirting with the wait staff and other female patrons.

Arthur managed to convince all four of the quite beautiful waitresses at the Glo Lounge to pose with him in fairly provocative poses. Steve upped the ante by laying down on a pool table and getting Tina to straddle him and feed him cherries. You see the progression here. So having moved onto the Rosen, they were looking for more opportunities.

In the middle of all this entered Brigit and Virginia, part of the Strangeloop team. They were quick to order drinks and get out of the line of fire to watch the festivities. For me, it was a bit of a Seinfeld-esque "Worlds Colliding" moment. But, that's life in the big city. Eventually around 2am Birgit and Virginia headed up to their room. Steve ended the competition by convincing a pretty lady from another table near by to pose with him for a photo. She pulled down her shirt to maximize cleavage and shoved his nose in there. Arthur surrendered.

It wasn't long before there was no more booze to be had, and we dispersed to our respective hotels. Tomorrow the conference would really begin.

Well, its that happy time again... off to Orlando!

Carl and I have a ton of things to do at Tech Ed US this year. Most everything we're doing is focused around the Virtual Tech Ed Stage down in the main conference hall across from the sponsor's area.

On Monday evening we'll be doing The 64 Bit Question, where the audience will get to win all kinds of prizes for answering questions about .NET and .NET Rocks!

Then there's Speaker Idol. We've got twelve contestants that are going to give five minute talks before an audience and panel of judges. The winner of Speaker Idol gets a speaking slot at Tech Ed US 2008, including all the perks a speaker gets: airfare, hotel, etc. There are four rounds of three speakers each, two on Tuesday, two on Wednesday. The winner of each round goes on to the finals on Thursday.

And, just to really spice things up, we're offering up a wildcard slot for each round. Think you can handle it? Get a hold of me and I'll get you into the competition. When Carl and I did Speaker Idol in Europe, one of the wildcards made it to the finals!

In between all this craziness we're going to do all sorts of panel discussions on a variety of topics. We've got several worked out already, if you have ideas for more, let me know and perhaps we can put you on the Virtual Tech Ed Stage. Also, we'll be recording .NET Rocks! and RunAs Radio as well. My co-host for RunAs, Greg Hughes, is going to hang with us for a few days.

I'm going to work hard to blog routinely from Tech Ed. Somehow I'll fit it all in.

So if you're at Tech Ed, drop by the Virtual Tech Ed stage and say hi!

I've been assembling my notes for my Chalk Talk on ASP.NET Scaling at TechEd US in Orlando.

The Chalk Talk will be held on Friday June 8 at 1pm, in the ASP.NET Community Area.

The biggest challenge in talking about scaling is to not fall into a discussion on performance. Most folks mix conversation about scaling and performance together, on the assumption that excellent performance provides excellent scaling. It isn't true - in some cases, to get great scalability, you have to impede performance. In reality, the best case scenario for scaling up an application is to maintain performance, not to improve it.

Performance is all about how quickly your web page responds to a request, scale is about how many requests you can handle at once. The "at once" part of that statement is important, since the idea that excellent performance provides excellent scale only is true when requests are not "at once", but fairly close together. If you could compute every page in 50ms and you only got requests every 100ms, you'd only be handling one request at a time... your great performance has given you the illusion of great scale. A lot of people consider this scaling, but its not really. Real scale is all about how your site handles simultaneous traffic.

There are two fundamental techniques for scaling: specialization and distribution.

Specialization is the process of separating out specific tasks that your web application does and building/buying specialized resources to handle those tasks better. You already do this - you have a separate database from your web servers. When you get into large scale web sites, image handling often becomes a specialization. You could set up dedicate image servers, or even offload that work to a third party company like Akamai. Getting the load of image handling out of your web servers allows them to handle more of the requests that they need to handle: Processing ASP.NET web pages. Obviously the challenge of making specialization work is going through every web page and altering the image tags so that they point at the image servers: Time consuming, but not especially hard. That's scaling by specialization.

The other technique for scaling is distribution. The key to distribution is creating multiple copies of the same resources and balancing work between them. Typically this would be multiple, identical web servers and a load balancer. The challenge to making distribution work well is effective load balancing, and that means a lack of affinity. That means no data specific to a given session kept in the web server, all of that information has to be available to every web server in the farm. There are a variety of affinite resources in ASP.NET, the best known of which is Session, and there are a variety of methods for making those resources non-affinite, the best known method being to write them to SQL Server.

This is where we get into the performance/scaling compromise: moving Session data out of the web server and over to SQL Server definitely slows down performance, in exchange for being much more scalable. But this is not a simple curve - sure, this method is slower per request on average, but that speed doesn't change for longer as the number of simultaneous requests increases.

Distribution also opens up advantages for reliability and maintainability, in exchange for dealing with the complexity of multiple servers. That's outside the scope of purely looking at scalability, but its certainly relevant to the equation over all. Its also important to remember that scalability isn't the only reason to have a web farm.

Of course, you can combine these two techniques, having specialized resources and distributing them across multiple servers. And this adds an additional advantage: You can scale each of those specialized resources independently. So if you need to improve the scalability of images, expand the image server farm.

The key to both these techniques is good instrumentation: You need to know where the problems are. Specialization helps because it creates clear boundaries between the various resources involved in a web application. And often you'll find that the non-affinity step you skipped becomes your key problem scaling up - and it will be instrumentation that will show that too you. Of course, then we get into the argument of whether or not the instrumentation *is* the problem, because it too exerts a certain amount of load on the servers.

There's more than just this to talk about as well: There are a variety of techniques for going to a non-affinity solution, there's also the challenges of caching at scale and invalidation.

And don't forget the database! As you scale up your web farm, the database can represent a serious bottleneck. Solving that is a huge task on its own, involving its own implementations around specialization and distribution.

I had originally suggested this topic as a breakout session, but I'm really looking forward to doing it as a Chalk Talk, for the higher level of interaction I expect to have with the audience. Chalk Talks are a lot more intimate, I'm going to steer clear of a slide deck and focus on using the white board to look at the various evolutions of a web application as it scales up.

Hope to see you there!

I'm in Montreal this week for DevTeach, the biggest little developers show in Canada.

Carl is here as well, along with many other of my favorite speakers.

On Wednesday I'll be doing my famous SQL Querying Tips & Tricks session, updated for 2007 (now with more Running Totals!).

But the biggest news came this morning: DevTeach is coming to Vancouver, November 26-30 2007!

I'm sure we'll pack the house in Vancouver, the number of speakers I've talked to over the years that have been waiting for a chance to come to Vancouver in the guise of a conference is amazing. I think its the best city in the world, but then I'm biased.

November is the rainy season for Vancouver, but if you like to ski, the end of November is right around the time the mountains open. There are three local mountains (Grouse, Seymour and Cypress) that you can take a local bus to. And then of course there's Whistler/Blackcomb, a couple of hours away. And there's another dozen ski mountains further away than that.

And besides, you're there to geek, and there's gonna be a lot of geekiness around at the end of November!

So here's a funny story.

Not counting the post from June 2006 where I provided my sample code for TechEd US in Boston, it was about a year ago since my last blog post.

I was the middle of some serious water cooling upgrades, PWOP had a bunch of new shows under way and things were just hopping.

And I got the fish tank in my office rebuilt and up and running with a new tank, new plumbing and some lovely salt water fish.

It lasted about 12 hours, then it burst. 120 gallons of salt water all over the floor.

Took six months to clean up.

I didn't want to talk about it. It was very difficult to get work done, to do much of anything.

But that's all over now, and I miss you guys.

And there's a TON to talk about! New machines, new companies, new shows! All good stuff.

I'm in Orlando at the moment at DevConnections. Carl and I are going to interview Scott Guthrie in front of an audience tomorrow. That'll be fun.

I'll keep you posted. Promise.

I'm hanging out in the United Kingdom in Reading, just outside of London, attending the VBUG Conference.

Carl and Mark Miller are here as well.

Yesterday I did my famous advanced querying session, I've attached my demo files here for the folks who wanted them.

AdvQuerying_Setup.sql (3.48 KB)

AdvQuerying.sql (23.52 KB)

I'm also including my error handling queries, since I had enough time to quickly show off how SQL Server 2005 can actually handle an error: in this example, I handle a deadlock inside a stored procedure.

Error Handling Main.sql (1.48 KB)

Error Handling Second.sql (.26 KB)

Besides my session, Carl and I did a DNR Live, talking to the four fellows involved in a Code Off - the concept is that all four developers, working independently, build four different UIs over top of a common set of banking web services. The four clients included WinForms, Office, ASP.NET and mobility clients (PDA and Smartphone). They had about four hours to build the clients, and the results were impressive. It was an incredibly compelling demonstration of how capable Visual Studio 2005 is.

The conference ends today, then I'm off to London for the weekend before heading home.

We got to Phoenix yesterday, and today we have a show at the Microsoft office in Phoenix.

The extra day is needed, not just for driving distance, but for sanity... its been a long trip, we need time to recover.

Plus I had a bunch of "real" work to do.

In between all this fun, John Bristowe and Co. put together a podcast called Plumbers at Work.

I'm hard on podcasts, I was before I was involved with .NET Rocks, and doubly so now. I won't listen to just anything, as soon as it gets annoying, I turn it off. But I listened to this entire show, and I encourage you to as well. Nice work JB!

We've had such a great time in Texas, I'm almost loath to leave.

Dallas, Houston and Austin have all been great hosts.

Jeff Palermo, here in Austin, went above and beyond: not only setting up the show, but also securing a venue for recording Mondays and hosting a barbeque tonight. Thanks Jeff!

Tomorrow we have a stop over in El Paso before going on to Phoenix for our 15th show.

Today is our longest haul to date, from Memphis to Dallas.

As I write this we're on the I-40 travelling 66mph heading 235, having crossed from Tennessee into Arkansas. The nav system says its an eight hour trip.

Geoff the sound guy was all excited to cross the Mississippi, naturally it was completely fogged in, the water not visible at all.

Last night's visit to the Memphis .NET Users Group brought a welcome relief from pizza - finally some barbeque! Everyone enjoyed some pulled pork sandwiches and beans, and the show itself went really well.

Three stops in Texas: Dallas, Houston and Austin. Check www.dotnetrocks.com/roadtrip for show details.

With the Orlando show cancelled, we got a weekend off to spend in Atlanta.

Lots of housekeeping, catching up work, editing shows, doing laundry, mundane stuff like that.

Today we topped out, visiting the eastern-most Frys there is, down in Duluth, GA.

In case you're not sure, I'm pretty excited about the whole thing, here's the close up:

Not that we bought much, but just walking through a Frys makes me happy.

After that, we hit Benihana for dinner.

Tomorrow - Nashville.

Looks like I spoke too soon - the folks on the ground in Orlando have now cancelled the show.

With evacuations already under way, it just doesn't make any sense to drive into trouble.

We'll make it up to them at some point, maybe a special trip (by plane, of course) in the spring.

Meantime, we have some extra time in Atlanta... this could be trouble.

The RoadTrip is under way, we've completed our first two shows in Boston, MA and Hartford, CT.

The crowds were appreciative of our talks, our info and the loot! We gave away some great stuff to Carl's renditions of Clementine.

We've been online on the RV (where I wrote this blog post), using GSM cell phones (courtesy Cingular) through our laptops. Along the way we've used the web cam to make faces at our kids and generally behave silly.

Tonight we're talking in New York, tomorrow at the New Jersey Code Camp. And Sunday we head for Philly to hangout with the Otaku Generation folks and record a Mondays!

At Tech Ed Orlando a bunch of the RDs got together to record ten minute videos called GrokTalks.

The idea of the GrokTalk came from the thought that often in conferences we find a useful tidbit in a session that is only about ten minutes long... so why not do only those ten minutes?

My GrokTalk focused on the new error handling capabilities of SQL Server 2005 and how you can use them to recover from a deadlock inside of a stored procedure. You can take a look at my video and the others at http://www.groktalk.net/.

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.

When we say Beer Night, we mean it!

Near the beginning of this evening session, Kent Alstad and Remi Caron conspired to bring Steve and I these huge two liter beers in Heineken labelled boots. I finished mine, Steve didn't. Not that he wasted it, he filled a dozen regular sized glasses from the boot.

The session itself was a melage of SQL Server 2005 topics, our slide deck and five slides: the title slide called the session “Estaban, 'splain dis Jukon to me!” It got less serious from there.

We had a fine discussion on the horror and fear around using the CLR inside of SQL Server, Ted Neward and Markus Egger got into it before Steve put the brakes on what was turning into an entirely too serious discussion.

I have to thank Kim Tripp for firmly planting all the details of Snapshot Isolation into my head, I think I was able to deliver a coherent explanation to everyone when the topic came up.

The beer continued to flow after the session, but we still knocked out some good talks the next morning. The conference was a ton of fun, its nice to see the SDGN group growing bigger and better still.

The day after the conference we went on the traditional Holland Tour, although this year it wasn't traditional at all... we actually got to sleep in a bit, rather than leaving at 8am as we have many years, we weren't loaded up and gone until 10! First stop was the Airborne Museum in Arnhem, which showed the history of the northern-most (and unsuccessful) part of operation Market-Garden.

Suitably subdued, our next stop after doing several spirals around the Netherlands was a paintball center!

The paintball matches were about 10 on 10, doing various missions: capture the flag, deliver your flag, and the Blackhawk down scenario, where you have a VIP stuck in the helicopter and have to go in and rescue them.

Our team won three of four matches, and I have to say that even our loss was pretty sketchy. I'd attribute our success to some great players, including the crazy fire teams of Steve Forte and Arnot, Ted Neward and Kent Alstad, Remi and Rob and the implacable Cathi Gero, who knows exactly what a VIP should do - stay alive and book it down the trail!

I'm sitting in the back of the main hall at the SDC 2005 Conference outside Arnhem, in the Netherlands.

There's a keynote going on... in Dutch.

I've just finished my first session, the Advanced Querying Tips & Tricks session that I'll do again next week at Tech Ed Orlando. The session went very well, I did it solo, in Orlando it'll be a duet with Stephen Forte.

After lunch Kent Alstad and I are up, talking about requirements. We've done the session before, its been updated, and its a lot of fun. We argue a fair bit, usually me causing trouble complaining about all this planning he wants to do.

Tonight, Steve and I are on again... in the schedule its called “Mid Evening Beer Session with Technical Content.“ In the past its been called a Geek Night and other silly things. Its really Steve and I talking about any old thing and generally behaving foolishly. As the beer flows, it gets more foolish. Looks like its going to be a packed house tonight...

Six weeks since my last entry... and its not that I don't have anything to say, but I've been so busy, by the time I get home, I just want to sleep.

Various highlights of the past six weeks:

• Hung out with Tim Huckaby and his family the weekend of April 16th, lots of fun!
• Kate Gregory and I did a duet deep dive at the end of April, talking about VSTO.
• All the Canadian RDs got together at Microsoft Canada in Mississauga, where we found out that Craig Flanagan, our intrepid leader, was moving on to bigger and more XBoxie things.
• Fellow RD Guy Barrette spent a week out here doing talks on Visual Studio 2005 and had a chance to visit my little toyland.
• I test ran my SQL Querying talk for Tech Ed at both the Victoria .NET User Group and VANTUG!

Which brings me up to current events... I leave this afternoon for the Netherlands to present at SDC 2005 at Papendal outside Arnhem. From there I'm headed to New London, Connecticut to spend some time with Carl and do a few shows (including something new!). After THAT, Carl and I are both headed down to Tech Ed in Orlando (same flights and everything).

I'm doing two sessions at Tech Ed, one is my Advanced Querying Techniques, Tips & Tricks session, which drills into various querying tricks I've collected over the years. This year I'm doing it with Steve Forte, and we're going to compare and contrast SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 to demonstrate how many of this slick querying techniques change with the latest and greatest.

The other session is a reprisal of my SQL Profiler for the Developer session that I did last year - there won't be any ice cream bars this year I'm afraid. However, I do have a special guest, Vipul Shah is going to show off some of the new goodies in SQL Server 2005 for Profiler junkies.

So finally, I'll stagger home around June 9th, all spring conferenced out.

Maybe then I'll get to fixing my monster machine... it burned up a week after I finished building it, and its sat there dead ever since. Did I mention I've been busy? There isn't going to be any easy fixes, everything worked perfect, but there's just not enough cooling in that little eight inch radiator.

Well, we're all confirmed now, Carl and I will be doing an episode of .NET Rocks! at Tech Ed Orlando this year. We'll be recording it over lunch on Wednesday, June 8th. Of course, you're all invited to watch the taping: .NET Rocks! live is much sillier than what actually ends up in the recorded version.

We really wanted to put together a cool show for a live taping, and I think we really lucked out - we're going to be talking to folks from the Visual Studio 2005 Team System development team.

• Michael Leworthy (VSTS general)
• Eric Lee (TFS and Test)
• Ajay Sudan (Architect and Developer)
• Bindia Hallauer (MSF)

Looks like its going to be a ton of fun. We had a great time doing .NET Rocks! in front of a live audience at DevConnections in Orlando, this show looks like it'll be a blast.

Been an intense few days.

Spent about 36 hours in Orlando, arriving Monday night and leaving Wednesday morning.

In between I visited with many of the speakers at DevConnections, recorded DotNetRocks with Rocky Lhotka and Bill Vaughn, recorded Mondays, had a couple of great meals, talked about The Daily Commute at great length with Carl and squeezed in a soak in the hot tub.

Not a whole lot of room for sleep in that 36 hours - I don't remember much of the flight home.

Now I'm back home, and back into the fray again... not just work, but now fellow Canadian RD Barry Gervin asked me to pitch in on his Architect's Breakfast - Enterprise Integration Patterns on March 30. Being a sucker for free food, I couldn't very well say no. I'll be moderating one of the tables and trying hard not to cause too many problems. Integration is a huge part of my life these days and always a fun topic to talk about. So if you haven't already signed up, now you have extra incentive - if goaded enough, I'll tell a story or two.

I'm enroute to Orlando via Seatac, Carl sends me this link to an article on podcasting in the Hartford Courant.

Meantime, Carl got TheDailyCommute web site up and running... there's a few more details to work out, but don't worry, you'll be blown away with this service. This is the future of podcasting.

What's next? People have been asking about a .NET Rocks World Tour... I was thinking maybe we should just go from Tech Ed to Tech Ed. Lemme know whatcha think!

Two ways, too...

Carl and I just finished interviewing Ken Getz, we dug into VS2005, ADO.NET, Vonage and other cool toys. Between Ken and I, Carl hardly got a word in edgewise...

Oh, and the Florida reference? Ken recently moved there.

The second Florida reference is next week's show, which is going to be recorded at the DevConnections conference in Orlando, Florida. That's right, Carl and I will be together, rather than on opposite coasts, along with Geoff. We're interviewing Bill Vaughn and Rocky Lhotka on Tuesday, March 22nd. Oh, and if you're at the conference, you can come and watch!

Yeop, those two are at it again.

Maybe there's some competition for the best Tech Ed video that I wasn't aware of, this one is amazing...

Brilliance that defies words, I swear.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,3a64708d-10e4-4e38-814c-550a3af88282.aspx

Fellow RD Jonathan Goodyear filled the RDs in on a little secret that's going to take place at TechEd 2005... unfortunately, I can't tell you what it is.

But you can get a hint at Jon's site at www.aspsoft.com/rallytrailer1.html.

Just another reason to attend TechEd 2005, as if you needed any more incentive.

Oh, and I'll be there too: I'm presenting two sessions, my famous SQL Profiler for the Developer session (which I'm told would have won “funniest session of Tech Ed” last year if such an award existed) and one of my favorite sessions of all time, but never-before-presented-at-TechEd, SQL Querying Tips & Techniques session.

Been a long while since I've posted to the blog - and no, I still haven't finished the Kili picture site. I will one of these days.

So here's a recap of the fun post-Kili:

Back in November I got together with all the DotNetRocks folks for a little party and we invited along some friends - about thirty people showed up in Las Vegas for some laughs and a first screening of DotNetRocks: The Movie. It was about that time that DNR reorganized, cutting back to one hour and focusing on a more serious interview approach to the show. The silly stuff (which includes me as the ToyBoy) moved over to a new show called Mondays - What Sunday Threw Up.

Also in November my buddy Joel Semeniuk dropped into Vancouver to do a presentation on Smart Client Development to the local users groups. Which was helpful for me, because I'd do the same presentation to the Victoria .NET Users Group the following week.

This year Christmas and New Years were low key events - last year the fam went to Costa Rica, which was good fun, but not exactly winter time any more. My favorite goodie for Christmas was a new set of chef's knives. Yeah I know, its weird, not a tech toy at all, but I already got lots of 'em, and everyone has given up trying to buy them for me, I'm too particular. But a good Heckel knife, well, that's a great gift.

So what's coming up? Well, DNR's 100th show is coming and I've been invited to reminisce with Carl and the gang. There's a new tour on Interoperability coming too. And I've got a whole bunch of crazy new hardware to set up. And then there's some really important stuff (see next post).