IE7 beta 1

The first stage of the beta process for Internet Explorer 7 has begun—developer testing! The latest version of the IE Web browser has been released for technical evaluation, feedback, and testing by software and Web site developers.

Beta 1 offers a preview of some of the benefits that Internet Explorer 7 will offer including:

PDC Bloggers Party

Only about 40 days till the PDC in Los Angeles California, Early Bird discount ends late tomorrow night and all the cool hotels are filling up  fast.                     

I think it's time to start planing a PDC Bloggers party….a chance to acknowledge the community of bloggers publishing content revolving around .Net technologies. Aggregated and syndicated, we're living and learning by linking and tracking-back. There are now over 900 bloggers listed on the PDCBLOGGERS site, so that rules out a restaurant, we'll have to find a more informal setting.

I would like to have a party on the beach, Sunset Boulevard, Rodeo Drive and the Hollywood hills cannot compare with surf and sand. Let's create a gathering that will be blogged about, flickr photographed and remembered for a long time.

I've been to many Microsoft parties, but we don't blog or talk much about them after drinking all their beer. We need a community celebration! Many of us had a great time hanging out in the cabañas at TechED, talking about .Net and anticipating an amazing PDC.

Any input, suggestions and ideas? What kind of beer do they have in LA? I guess we should start with the local INETA User Groups. A party for developers created by developers, a bonfire, cold beer and barbeque under the stars.....Surf City here we come!

SpeechTEK 2005

New York Marriott Marquis, August 1-3

For eleven years, SpeechTEK has been delivering quality, in-depth content focusing on speech technology.

• Conference Brochure
• Schedule At-A-Glance
• Conference Program
• SpeechTEK University: In-Depth Tutorials
• Vertical Market Workshops
• VOX Conference: Presented by Opus Research
• Advanced Speech Technologies Symposium: Presented by AVIOS

This years line-up looks very impressive, with Intel, IBM, Cisco, Avaya and Microsoft. At last years SpeechTEK in NYC I spotted a dozen Tablet PC's, the most I have ever seen at any conference. Just to meet and listen to James A. Larson, of Intel talk about VoiceXML 2.0 is worth the price of admisson. Today is the last day to register on-line, use the Priority Code EM14  and you'll save $189. 

NY SQL UG Meeting

NY Metro SQL Server Users Group

The July 28th Meeting

Graphical Query Plans & Performance Tuning in SQL2000 and SQL2005

Speaker: Steve Kass, SQL Server MVP

In both SQL Server 2000 and 2005, graphical query plans are invaluable for troubleshooting and tuning. Using sample queries on variations of the Northwind sample database, we'll survey as many of the following topics as we can.

• Using SQL Server 2000 Query Analyzer, we’ll start with a quick overview of graphical plans in 2000 and 2005: general layout, common plan operators, and pop-up details.
• SQL Server can generate both estimated and actual graphical plans. What additional information is in the actual plan, and what actual plan detail are still not “actual”?
• Many slow-running queries have a single bottleneck. We’ll see how graphical plans help us identify, understand, and eliminate some common bottlenecks.
• SQL Server creates and caches parameterized plans for stored procedures and for some ad hoc queries. This usually helps, but not always; graphical plans can help clarify the situation. [New 2005 info]
• User-defined functions, column-to-column joins, and certain WHERE clauses can lead to inaccurate cost estimates, which can be seen in the graphical plan. [New 2005 info]
• Graphical plans reveal which new 2005 features (like the analytic functions) provide real performance improvements, and which (like APPLY and recursive queries), do not.
• In some situations, query cost estimates are very wrong, and a query takes hundreds or thousands of times longer than the optimizer expects. We'll see why, what to do about it, and why it's not a bug. [New 2005 info].
• Sometimes the estimated execution plan is misleading, and can suggest problems where there are none. You won’t be misled if you’ve seen these situations before.

Getting ATOM

Feed Validator

Ever since the the IETF Atom syndication format specification has been declared ready for implementation (more), the demand for Atom 1.0 support by the Feed Validator has been high.

As progress on implementing the Atom 1.0 test cases has reached the point where the feed validator is rarely outright misleading any more, it is time for a wider exposure. At this point, the Feed Validator will accept bug reports on Atom 1.0 support

Particularly be on the look out for the following:

• Errors being reported as warnings, and vice versa
• Additional places where warnings would be helpful
• Unclear or confusing advice

As always, feel free to join us on the feedvalidator-users discussion list.

DasBlog 1.8 will/does produce Atom 1.0 valid documents