Microsoft SQL Server code-named 'Denali' - CTP1

Wednesday morning I’ll be giving a quick summary of all the new announcements from the 2010 PASS Summit in Seattle (courtesy of LobsterPot’s on-the-spot reporters Rob and Roger) to the Adelaide leg of the PDC10 Roadshow.

In preparation for that, I did a quick search for any Denali titbits, and discovered the CTP is now publicly available. I’m downloading as we speak/type. Annoyingly, the Release Notes link is broken at the moment. Hopefully that gets fixed soon.

Download links

My top predictions for new features (seeing as I haven’t got it installed yet to find out)

• Failover cluster support for Windows Phone 7
• Query optimiser support for X-Box 360 Kinect

Ha.. though actually I can see some possible use of Kinect with reporting and data mining in the future.. That would be cool.

Maybe they’d have to call that “Minority Report-ing Services” 😀

Take your partner by the hand..

If LobsterPot Solutions had a theme song, one pretty obvious choice would be Rock Lobster by The B52s.

It looks like we now have another option!

First Microsoft Partner with Gold Competency in Australia - Well done Rob, Ben, Roger, Ashley (and me!).

Also a big welcome to Ashley, our most recent Lobster to jump in the pot 😀

Select your Windows Phone 7 handset with Silverlight PivotViewer

Windows Phone 7 devices are now available in Australia. I dropped into a Telstra shop yesterday and spent a few minutes playing with their demo model. At some stage I’m hoping I’ll be able to actually purchase one of these things for myself! (A definite step up from my super-basic C3050, who’s primary reason for purchase was that it could at least play podcasts*).

Of course, the main reason I’d like a Windows Phone 7 is to play Nigel’s Word Puzzle game, but there’s also the whole “smartphone” thing of email/calendar/podcasts etc. If they can fix the “just show only the default calendar for a single email source” limitation (so that I can retrieve all our Google calendars for our family), then I reckon I’d consider getting Narelle one too, so that I could finally solve my calendar problem.

Anyway, so how to choose from the “vast array” (slight exaggeration!) of new handsets entering the market?

Why not try out a new Pivot Collection I’ve created that lets you sort and filter by your requirements – just go to http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au/WP7/ and have fun!

Thanks to Rob for kindly hosting this on the LobsterPot Solutions site.

* – And I’m not even doing that right now as I’ve lost the earphones, and it has a silly non-standard plug so I haven’t replaced them yet. Not that I’m saying the loss of earphones alone is justification for getting a new phone!