On Wednesday at the two Adelaide sessions of the PDC Roadshow I gave the world's fastest overview of interesting things coming in the next version of SQL Server – codenamed 'Denali'.

I'd even whipped up some PowerPoint slides, but due to time constraints didn't get to share them with everyone, so I've summarised the main points here:

Main highlights

• http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=6a04f16f-f6be-4f92-9c92-f7e5677d91f9
• SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse
  • Microsoft Critical Advantage Program
• SQL Azure Reporting
• SQL Azure
• Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket

Areas unchanged in CTP1

• Analysis Services
• Data Quality Services
• Reporting Services
• Replication
• Service Broker

SQL Server Engine

• SMSS uses VS2010 shell
• Transact-SQL debugging and IntelliSense
• Transact-SQL Snippets
• Contained databases
• SEQUENCE objects
• Circular arc segment (spatial)
• User-defined server roles

SQL Server Integration Services

• “Biggest change since 2005”
• New deployment model
• Object Impact and Data Lineage Analysis
  • Dependency Designer
• Merge and Merge Join memory improvements
• Designer enhancements
• Edit disconnected components
• Data correction component

'Atlanta'

• Runs on your SQL Server system Uploading information to cloud service
  • Configuration
  • Performance, etc
• Browse using a dashboard
• Give access to Microsoft Support

'Crescent'

• Web-based reporting experience that offers rich visualization to let you project the story about your data to end users and other business users

Microsoft Certified Masters

• Just sit the exams (don't have to do all the training)
• No testing centres in Australia yet

If you're interested in finding out about these features (and more), Roger Noble and Rob Farley will be talking all about 'Denali' at this month's Adelaide SQL User Group (Tuesday 23rd November).

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"

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

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!

My ISP (Internode) provides a number of unmetered streaming radio stations for its customers. A while back I'd followed some instructions on how to set up shortcuts in Media Center to link to some of these stations. This worked pretty well, until the ISP reorganised their server and all of the shortcuts broke. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to write a simple Media Center application that could grab the current radio list from the published radio stream RSS feed, list those stations in Media Center and allow selecting a station and getting Media Center to start playing it.

1. Download and install the Windows 7 Media Center SDK. This install some samples, the SDK help file and some templates (but only for Visual Studio 2008).
2. Go to Charlie Owen's blog and download his Addendum.zip. Amongst other things, this contains both project and item templates suitable for Visual Studio 2010. Follow the instructions to copy the templates into your Visual Studio templates folder.
3. Download and install the latest WiX 3.5 build (WiX 3.5 includes support for 2010)

Now you can start Visual Studio and you'll see a new project template in the C# language section. There's a few more things I needed to update to get everything working properly:

• Search for "Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A" and replace it with "Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A" (eg. devinstall.cmd)
• Search for "Windows Installer XML v3\bin" and replace it with "Windows Installer XML v3.5\bin" (eg. build.cmd)

Then it's just a matter of getting up to speed with the intricacies of Media Center application writing!

The source code for the application (InternodeRadioMCE) is published on Google Code. It is very rough at the moment. As I get more familiar with the Media Center programming model I hope to improve it a bit!

And the photo? It's of Rocky River (courtesy of our recent holiday to Kangaroo Island) – and the closest thing I could think of to a stream (as in streaming radio!)