This week I had my first INETA user group speaking gig at the Alberta .NET Users Group in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I spoke about a lot of the cool new security features in SQL Server 2005 from a developer's perspective to about 130 people.
Thanks to everyone for their kind hospitality and to INETA and Microsoft for making this sort of thing available. Thanks particularly to Regional Director John Bristowe, who was kind enough to take me to a fabulous dinner at Indian restaurant Rajdoot. We don't have an Indian restaurant in Fairbanks--which otherwise is well represented by types of restaurants--so that was a real treat.
DataDirect Technologies, maker of Stylus Studio, a set of XML and XSLT editing tools, has an interesting interview on their site with Dr. Daniela Florescu. She is one of the editors of the XQuery specification and talks about the technology's role in SOA applications and other interesting stuff. Particularly enticing is her comment at the end of the interview...might we see a final spec this spring? (Probably not, since it is still only a Working Draft, three fairly major steps away from being a final recommendation.) Hmm...but it would certainly be nice to have the final version integrated into SQL Server 2005.
By the way, keep in mind that SQL Server 2005 still extends XQuery quite a bit while being a subset of the spec. For one thing, XQuery 1.0 is read only, while you can use it in SQL Server 2005 to modify data as well through T-SQL extensions to the XML data type.
And I'll be talking about this stuff at DevConnections Orlando this spring.