We attended the Microsoft Jumpstart Devchat today in Port Elizabeth. The venue was the Spotted Cow pub/restaurant in Central which although not the most luxurious actually accommodated all of us quite nicely and the snacks were great. There were 6 of us attending from emediaIT and also decent attendance from the other IT companies in the area.
The speakers were both good, starting off with Eben De Wit (http://dotnet.org.za/eben/) and followed by Peter Willmot. They covered a range of new SQL Server 2008/Visual Studio 2008 features including...
- SQL Server 2008 Transparent Encryption
- Occassionally Connected Applications
- Sync Services for ADO.NET
- DMF Policies
- Database Mirroring - Witness Server
- BI Enhancements in SQL Server 2008
- SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services & Analysis Services
- New HierarchyID data type
- Spatial data support - New Geometry/Geography data types
- Filestream attribute for blob types
- LINQ to SQL
- LINQ to Entites
All in all it was worth attending, although I do wish that the session had been longer as there are a number of other new SQL Server 2008 features that I would like to have heard about. We did however join them both for lunch after the event and were able to pick their brain's/knowledge further. It is time that Microsoft brings the bigger/more comprehensive conferences/events to Port Elizabeth.
Update 06/03/2008: After further discussions with the rest of our team the general feeling is that there was too much focus on Visual Studio 2008, albeit including database tools, but not enough on the changes in SQL Server 2008 itself. The timeframe was also simply not enough and it felt like some topics were rushed, while others were skipped altogether. There were a few instances where the excercises did not go quite to plan, either because pre-requisites were not in place or because files could not be found.
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