This week I have been visiting a number of customers and ISV's who are building applications on the .NET Framework 2.0 with Visual Studio 2005. Most of them are heavily relying on SQL Server 2005 for data management and analysis. While all these customers are waiting for the beta 2 bits they are also very interested in knowing what will be contained in the Viusal Studio 2005 go-live license. As announced earlier, the beta 2 contains this go-live license. More license details will be announced beginning of next week.
During my visits I also received a number of questions on the use of XML in SQL Server 2005 and more specific on XQuery and XPath. For those of you interested in some good posts on SQL Server 2005 subscribe to these expert blogs:
Some great posts on XQuery can be found on Bob Beauchemin's blog. More XML Best Practices for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 can be found in this MSDN article.
From Monday on there are also a number of web casts (Level 200 & 300) on SQL Server 2005 coming your way. A complete overview can be found on http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msdnsqlserver2005.mspx.
Oh ... and it looks like beta 2 is on its way to the MSDN Subscriber Downloads and betaone. Now you just have to find the right SQL Server 2005 build for Visual Studio 2005 beta 2. Not?