TechEd Day 2

I'm half asleep as a result of the TechFest party last night so if this doesn't make much sense I apologise...

Highlights from TechEd New Zealand day two:

• Shu Scott on SQL Server 2005 optimisation was a usefully practical set of best practices to ensure queries run as efficiently as possible. Packed with content and some good explanations of why things work the way they do. I'm fascinated by the way the query optimiser chooses query plans, something to look into more.
  
• Joel Pobar on C# 3.0 - probably the 'geekiest' session I've been to so far and was tremendous fun. Looks like there's lots of cool new features in the next version of C# to make our lives easier and coding faster. Auto-implemented properties and initialisers and type inference I'm sure I'll be using as soon as they're released. We also implemented LINQ from scratch in about 15 minutes which was a great romp through the new features. I'm particularly looking forward to playing with LINQ.
• Jeremy Boyd on SQL Server 2008 - lots of new features here too, and again often around making life easier and faster. Being able to insert multiple rows from a single INSERT INTO VALUES statement will make creating test data rather less painful and the new MERGE statement will also be used a lot I'm sure.

Overall, very 'geeky' day yesterday but good fun and plenty of things to continue playing with a investigating. Downloading SQL Server 2008 CTP and having a play is definitely on my to-do list once I'm back home.