Playing with Fire (PDC Begins)

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PDC 2005 has begun. I arrived here in Los Angeles yesterday from Seattle. As you might have heard, the entire city of LA lost power yesterday which meant I had to wait around for an extra hour in the lobby of my hotel. It was very surreal seeing a bunch of tech guys wandering around in the dark talking on cell phones.

I have a couple of talks at Tech Ed. First, I'm doing a talk on Wednesday about adding reporting to smart client applications. I'll show the new VS report controls in a variety of scenarios. Then on Thursday, I team up with Chris McCulka on building BI portals using the upcoming release of SharePoint. The Office marketing folks continue to tell me that SharePoint can only be used as an adjective, not a noun but they fortunately don't get edit rights in my blog. :)

Other SQL Server BI sessions you might want to check out are:

  • DAT411 - Advanced ETL: Embedding Integration Services (Wednesday at 3:15 PM)
  • DATL02 - BI “Power Hour” (Thursday at 1:00 PM)
  • OFF323 - Excel “12” and SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services (Friday at 10:30 AM)

Overall, there should be some good stuff at the show. Personally, I'm more of a TechEd person that a PDC person. To me, TechEd is about how to use the real software to make real money while PDC is about cool next gen stuff that might or might not actually ship. I'm not saying I don't enjoy a little gee-whiz technology any less than the next geek, I just think that I'm just a practical guy.

And just to be clear, I only brought two pairs of shoes.