Lewies Blog

I got up bright an early today. I got up a few times, but I eventually left at 7:30. It took about 3 hours to get to the city, get lost, get lost more, hunt for a parking lot, and arrive at the Washington Convention Center. I totally missed the keynote speaker.

I got a bag of goodies and started going around and meeting with different vendors of software. I had a lot of interesting conversations and was able to broaden my knowledge of what was out there exactly. I also got toys.

I met up with a co-worker and after the morning session, we took a cab over to her place for lunch and to figure out how to configure her laptop. After getting back to the convention center, we split up and attended different tracks. I was going for databases and the like, and she was going into development.

I was simply amazed that T-SQL now has try/catch blocks. Can you believe it? I used to write a lot of code to handle transactions and checking to see if a number of SQL statements had failed. There was much more in the stability of the databases and the ability to read tables when a transaction had not yet been committed. They went into the CLR integration too. It seems that you only use that if you are doing some heavy logic that SQL wasn’t really meant for, such as using arrays.

I looked at the last two events on the schedule and wasn’t all that amused about the database track. I switched over to the development and joined my coworker. We sat through a web application development. I had already known about most of the stuff coming down the road. I found that other things you could now do, were already being used in a similar fashion in past projects I worked on. It’s nice to see that I was headed toward the rite direction.

I stopped by the place where I registered and dropped off my survey. In return they punched a badge that had my managers name on it (since I took his place), and handed me a shirt and a copy of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, and the MSDN Library.

On the way home, traffic was slow. I looked over to see if I could change lanes and I ended up rear-ending the car in front of me. No one was hurt and the woman saw that there was no damage. I wrote down my information anyway and handed it to her with my Insurance carrier, license plate, name and phone number.

Continuing home, my engine kept feeling like it was going to stall any minute. The engine light was solid on most of the way, but would sometimes blink. It felt like it had most problems when I was stopped at lights, or accelerating - especially up hills. I’ll have to get that looked into soon.

I got all my toys out and offered a few to my wife. She liked the flashing HP necklace. I tried on one of the shirts. Another shirt that I got came wrapped up as a brick. When I unfolded it, it was a mess of wrinkles.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Employment, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.