DevTeach Day 2

Day 2 started out very well - an interesting demo of the data mining tools for Office by Jessica M. Moss.  This is something I'm definitely going to be spending some time on as soon as I free up some time.

Next up was Peter DeBetta's Encryption in SQL Server 2008.  I was disappointed to learn transparent data encryption in only in the enterprise version.  Microsoft (marketing?) has some funny ideas about what features are enterprise features.  That's a post for another day.  Peter's treatment of the topic was useful and interesting.  Security always has to be on our minds, and dedicating an hour to thinking about this is always a good investment of time.

Next I chose Christian Coté's session on Visual Studio Database Edition.  This is an enormously valuable tool, and I've only started using it recently.  I learned a lot in this session, and I should be able to apply some of it immediately.

I didn't know anything about ASP.NET Dynamic Data before Don Kiely's presentation, but I've enjoyed his sessions in the past, so I decided to check it out.  This is some neat technology.  I don't have an immediate use for it, but I'm glad I know about it because this is the type of thing that everybody has to deal with at some point.

Next was Stephen Forte's Data Access session.  This guy is very entertaining.  A timeline of Microsoft data access technologies should not be a fun presentation.  But it was! 

Also sat in on the .Net Rocks session with Ted Neward and Amanda Laucher.  As a longtime listener, it was fun to watch this show being recorded.  Later, I saw on twitter that show #400 was being done in the hotel lounge, but 8am to 8pm is a long enough day for me.  Especially after getting up early to get in a run on the treadmill before the first session.