Sengupta, David. Tech-Ed Day 2. Jun 7, 2005.

Some brief comments on today's events. Keynote by Paul Flessner (and MC-ed by Samantha Bee) highlighted SQL Server 2005 and alot of the developer benefits in VS2005 ... Paul announced the launch of SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006 and Visual Studio 2005 will all happen the week of November 7, 2005. Had a nice demo of SQL Server 2005 64-bit edition performance & scale (along with expected but impressively high TPC-C and TPC-H benchmark results), along with some of the fail-over capabilities ... assisted by a $28,000 "BattleBot" that Microsoft contracted ASPSOFT to create to showcase intelligent business logic ... and to use in destroying a network switch with it's ax as part of the demonstration. Also had a demo of RFID technologies using the RFID tags that many of us have been carrying around all week for the demonstration. Finally the usual slew of press releases today ... noteworthy ones follow. Extensions of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services: Xcelsius (enterprise dashboards as part of their Xcelsius XRS solution), Fenestrae (extensions to SWL Server 2005 Reporting Services), and ActiveReports for .NET from Data Dynamics, Ltd. Also manageability press from TNT Software announcing their ELM Enterprise Manager 4.0 offering. That's all for now ...