I'm back at work after two weeks leave over the Christmas/New Year's break. Not too many emails to sort through, and not too many problems to fix so far.

One nice thing was that Michael from ISTS (our IT Unit) got hold of the latest build of Symantec AntiVirus which finally supports Vista 64bit.

It's been the one big uncertainty about running Vista 64-bit - having to tread very carefully for the last month or two without that extra safety net.

I also got access to the RTM of Office 2007 Enterprise Edition just before I went on leave, so it's nice to be running the release version of Office 2007 now.

You may recall that I was supposed to do this exam yesterday, but there was a problem with the exam workstation, so I had to reschedule to today. It was a bit tight, as Pearson VUE wouldn't let me reschedule to next year as the voucher I used expires on 31st December.

It was reasonably tricky - a couple of the questions I just had to guess - particularly some of the stuff I don't use much, but I felt reasonably confident about most of them.

Still, it was a big relief to get to the final screen to see "You have been successful" (or words to that effect). I wanted to shout "YAY", but there were other people doing exams in the same room so I just did it silently instead :-)

I got 894 by the way.

December 2006 CTP of SQL 2005 Service Pack 2

• SQL Server 2005 SP2 CTP
• Feature Pack
• Books Online

A new release for Desktop Search 3.0 (including Vista) for searching network files shares.

Here's the first beta of the update to improve support for Visual Studio 2005 running on Vista - Download details: VS2005 SP1 Update for Vista