What a difference a month makes...

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Between TechReady in Seattle (an internal technical conference, think of it as Tech Ed for Microsoft folks) followed by holidays I've been out of the office for the last month, during which there has been many interesting happenings, including

    • SQL Server 2008 RTM (Aug 6th) - you can download an eval from here. It seems like quite a while since we did the launch event, particularly the community launch which we kicked off in Belfast last January (!)

      Also of interest to be above would be the latest Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack, including:

      • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services 10.0 OLE DB Provider
      • Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Backward Compatibility Components
      • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Command Line Utilities
      • SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1
      • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Data Mining Add-ins for Microsoft Office 2007
      • Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP 7
      • Microsoft Core XML Services (MSXML) 6.0
      • Microsoft SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver 1.2
      • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Management Objects
      • Microsoft OLEDB Provider for DB2
      • SQL Server Remote Blob Store
      • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native Client
      • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Policies
      • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Technologies
      • Microsoft SQL Server System CLR Types
      • Microsoft Sync Framework
      • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Advisor

      You can download the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack for August 2008 here

    • Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 (Aug 11th) - this is a Service Pack but not as you know it. As well as bug fixes and performance improvements this includes numerous new features such as the .NET Framework Client Profile, ADO.NET Entity Framework, ASP.NET Dynamic Data and more. You can download VS 2008 SP1 from here and .NET 3.5 SP1 from here

    • While you're at it you might as well download the .NET Framework 3.5 Enhancments Training Kit from here, and learn how to utilize the .NET 3.5 Enhancement features including: ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET AJAX History, ASP.NET Routing, ADO.NET Data Services, ADO.NET Entity Framework, WCF 3.5 SP1, and the .NET Framework Client Profile. You'll get labs, demos and PPTs all included!

    • If you're working with Silverlight and have upgraded to or plan to upgrade to VS 2008 SP1 then you'll need to download the updated Silverlight tools beta 2 for VS 2008 from here

    • Live Mesh now available in Ireland (Aug 18th) - essentially Live Mesh allows you to access data and applications on your different devices. For example you can install the Live Mesh software on different computers so you can synchronise folders and connect to them from anywhere. Check out http://www.mesh.com for more info - note that it's a technology preview, so there is a max limit on the number of users allowed, so don't hang around

 

Last but not least, my last post on this blog sparked an interesting series of comments regarding Silverlight which I will address in a followup post - good to know people are reading!

 

Cross posted from ronan's blog