Visual Studio 2005 Ready Launch - Cape Town

So I went to the Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 Ready Launch at Thunder City today (and yes, they did keep calling it that throughout the presentation, even though it's a bit of a mouthful - and if I hear the word "absolutely" one more time, I'm going to scream).

It was pretty cool - far more of a marketing event than a tech event like DevDays, but the setup was pretty good. It was in the main (empty) hangar at Thunder City, and they had really loud music and fog machines misting up the hangar at first, so it was really impressive. Things quieted down a bit once they started; Ed Jordan was the MC, with some comedian guy (I forget his name), who was really funny at times, but, at other times, not so much.

There's not really a lot to say about the presentations - in fact, I tuned out through most of it as it was very vague wishy-washy marketing hype like "more productive" and "improved peformance" with lots of "integrated" and "interface"s dropped in. So there's probably better comment on this over at dotnet.org.za.

But here are a couple of my thoughts:

In the very beginning, they played a video clip of Steve Ballmer saying how great this launch is. I was half-expecting someone to shout out "Google", or "Hide the chairs!". But this crowd was either too polite or too microsoft oriented to do that, unfortunatley :-(

They played another clip of how HMV absolutely love MS and are using their products for everything including their digital download service. Despite lots of comments about digital downloads, they didn't use the word MP3 once, and the only device they showed playing these digital downloads were not iPods (I think they were the Creative Zen, but I'm not sure). Similarly, BB&D, one of their partners, was running a competition to win MP3 players - again, not an iPod in sight :-)

They made a big deal about how SQL Server Express is now available for free, and you can just download it free. And that Visual Studio Express is also available via a free download for a limited period. I don't think they realised that they're in South Africa - either we're on dial-up, and can't download anything larger than a meg or two; or we're on a hard-capped ADSL line and don't dare download anything large if we want to have any bandwidth left for e-mail and surfing.

From a tech point of view, they showed how integrated SQL Server and Visual Studio have become - Query Analyzer and Enterprise Manager are now integrated into a Visual Studio style app, and - this is cool - you can simply drag and drop stored procs into your code! And can then set breakpoints and debug your stored procs! You can also - and this I have my doubts about - call .Net code from your stored proc. In the demo, they put a call to a webservice into a stored proc, which just doesn't seem like a very good idea to me.

I took some pictures on my cellphone camera, but they all turned out pretty badly. If I get a bunch of comments clamouring for photos, I'll post them, but somehow that seems fairly unlikely :P

Update: I hear that in the US, everyone got CDs containing Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition - free. We got a 90-day trial version of VS2005 Pro :-( Yeah, that makes a lot of sense - in a First World, large country where exchange rate isn't an issue and where you probably make most of your sales, give away your product free. In a 3rd world developing country where the exchange rate is horrible and which probably isn't a major market for you anyway, hand out 90-day trial CDs. The mind boggles.

But, all is not lost. I mentioned above that you can download SQL Server Express - if you attended the launch and got your 90-day trial of VS 2005 Pro CDs, you have SSE already! Just go to CD2, go to the WCU folder and you'll see a folder named SSE. This seems to contain both the 64-bit and 32-bit editions of SQL Server Express (although you have to uninstall all Betas to be able to install it, so it may not be worth it if you're still using VS2005 Beta 2 - when do these betas expire, anyway?)

And of course these CDs contain the .Net Framework 2.0, which should also save you some bandwidth. The SQL Server 2005 MSDN dvd also seems to contain the msdn not only for SQL Server, but also for VS2005, which should save you even more bandwidth (I'm assuming that while the SQL Server install on the CD is limited to a 180-day trial, the msdn stuff isn't. This may or may not be a reasonable assumption.)

But while they claimed that they couldn't distribute SSE and the VSE editions on CD because it would be too much admin, they did manage to distribute a Ready Launch CD containing, from the look of it, a bunch of marketing brochures as .pdf from themselves and their Launch partners.

What I would have liked to see, instead, is a real breakdown of the differences between the different VS2005 editions. Not the fluffy, hand-wavy "this one's aimed at hobbyists, and this one's for serious developers, and this one's for big companies"; definitive "this includes xxx while this one doesn't" kind of thing.

Calling all bikers: ToyRun 2005

Next Sunday (27 November) is the ToyRun, and this year I'm actually going to take part.

If you haven't heard of it before, the ToyRun is a mass ride (I think it was something like 40000 bikes across South Africa last year), with the aim of donating toys to children's charities for Christmas. It's great fun, and awesome to see. According to the ToyRun website it's now an international event, and is the biggest motorbike charity event in South Africa.

So if you have a bike licence, and a bike (or access to a bike), why not take part? The details for each of the national rides are here. In Cape Town, there are going to be two meeting points - one at Ratanga Junction, and the normal one at Ottery Hypermarket. The two will join at Settler's Way (which is going to be interesting!), and the ride ends at Maynardville as usual. Entrance is one toy (to be donated to charity), and non-bikers can join in at Maynardville afterwards provided that they also bring one toy to donate. There will be food stalls, entertainment (Kurt Schoenraad and Mark Lottering will be performing), and lots of bike and bike gear!

For more information, you can read the Press Kit (MSWord doc) or visit the official ToyRun website.

I have a couple of photos from last year; they're pretty bad, but see below anyway. I'd also post a couple of photos of the bike I'll be riding (a Kymco Hipster 125cc), but the only photos I have are either fuzzy cellphone camera photos, and photos that show off the bike nicely but have me looking stupid in them (my natural state in photos :P). I'll try to get some good ones this year and post them next week.

ToyRun 2004:

One of the two trailers filled with toys.	All that shiny stuff in the background? That's some of the bikes that took part.

Update (28/11/2005):

I did the ToyRun yesterday, and seeing (and hearing!) all those bikes in one place was really impressive. IOL has a pretty good write up, and they have a picture gallery as well. I'll post some of the pics I took, probably tomorrow. The crowds were great - people were lining the roads, and everyone was cheering and clapping and you really felt like you were doing something amazingly cool :-) But while it was amazingly non-chaotic, given how many bikes there were, it was also amazingly non-organized - it seemed (and maybe it was just because it was my first run, and I didn't know anyone else there and wasn't there as part of a club) that it wasn't so much a whole bunch of bikers getting together to do a run, as co-incidentally lots of individual bikers who happened to be in the same place going the same way at the same time. But still, it was a fun event and worth the sunburn :-)

Update 2/12/2005:

Here are a couple of the photos I took (the cool black&silver cruise is mine :D):

ToyRun 2005:

WebSites and DNS Servers

Two kinda unrelated topics today, but I didn't feel like doing two separate posts (yeah, I know, lazy).

I've got a new version of my website up - for those who remember, I was trying to create a site that was easy to maintain, by having a single index page with dynamically loaded iframe content for menu items and content. It took a while, and I got it working, but there were significant problems with it, not lease that search engines would index and provide links to the iframe content htmls rather than the index page. So my new approach is template-like: I have a main template file which includes comment tags for customizable elements (such as
menu buttons and content). I then wrote a little parser which takes the template file, the content file, and the name of the content, and generates the content page. So if I want to make a change to the menu, or the colours, or something like that, I just change the template, run each of my content snippet files through the parser, and get full content files to upload. Not quite as cool as what I was trying to do before, but it does work much better.

DNS Servers - well, I've been using my motorola v300 to connect my laptop to the internet via GPRS. As a pay per mb scheme, it can get expensive for heavy browsing or downloading, but it waaay cheaper than dial-up or adsl, and it's great if all you really want to do is have a permanent connection to the net, browse every now and then, and be permanently signed in to msn messenger. I'm with Vodacom, on a Family Top-up contract, and following their unwritten "worst of both worlds" philosophy (under which my contract acts like a contract when prepaid would be better, and acts like prepaid when a contract would be better), I can't buy bundled megs and so can't the cheaper rates. But overall it's been pretty cool.

Lately, though, I've been having DNS problems. I'm often having problems logging in - their server doesn't respond - or I can login but can't browse or login to msn since I can't resolve ip addresses, and msn reports that there's a DNS problem. Or I'm running along fine, but suddenly get signed out of msn and can't browse because I've lost the ability to resolve ip's. Or I get disconnected, apparently for the same reason. And even when it's going fairly smoothly, I often have to access pages twice - the first time it's "page couldn't be found", the second time it works. This is annoying for all the obvious reasons, but also because it becomes difficult to measure usage, since it's a bunch of separate sessions (some very, very short) instead of one long one. Also, when I lose the DNS during a session, it doesn't let me disconnect properly so I have to actually switch off my phone and then switch it back on again to reset the GPRS thingy, which is a pain.

I e-mailed them about it, and after they checked that the number I was dialling was correct (and asking for my handset make & model, don't ask me why) they escalated the matter to one of their "VAS consultants", who phoned me on my cell while I was at work (and, typically, not at my desk). I really wish people wouldn't do this - if I've logged a complaint via e-mail, respond via e-mail, dammit! I work in a very open-plan office, and it's very difficult to take phone calls during work (and impossible to take phone calls where you don't want everyone to hear what you're talking about, not that that's particularly relevant here). I've e-mailed them back to ask them to respond via e-mail or after hours, so hopefully they will and hopefully they'll have something useful to tell me, but I doubt it (especially after my experiences with Storm At Home).

SA Broadband: an envelope, a stamp, and a CD - Literally!

From a Business Day article posted on myadsl:

The complex task of building Salt, the biggest optical telescope in the southern hemisphere, was achieved on time, on spec and on budget.

And the thing works pretty darn well too according to its resident scientists, who are already snapping sterling pictures of the stars above.

Only trouble is, they are having tremendous difficulties sharing their information with their colleagues across the globe.

One of Salt’s most important features is the fact that it is used to collect astronomical data without scientists having to travel to the site — the local crew take pictures of various heavenly bodies, and are theoretically supposed to send the info off to their buddies via the internet.

But no, that pesky telecoms monopoly Telkom is getting in the way again. And, as usual, the insufficient bandwidth and sky high rates mean it is not practical to use the world wide web.

What an insane waste, not to mention loss of face for the South African scientific community. To fulfil the telescope’s intended purpose, the Salt operators must burn their data onto a compact disc and pop it in the post. Snail mail.

This is just insane. The "broadband = envelope + CD" thing is a standing joke in SA, but to see that it is literally true is just heartbreaking. When is the government going to wake up and see that this is not in the best interest of SA?