i never imagined that i would be sitting here and writing a blog when there are tons of other things to do. however what better topic to pick up for a start than TechEd 2006. According to Microsoft, this is supposed to be the biggest TechEd ever in India (don;t they say the same every year). Happening across 5 cities (Pune makes it debut) across the entire month of June.

Its always an honour to be asked to present at one of the premier technical events in the world and this time i am taking three sessions.

Session 1 : SQL Server 2005 CLR Integration Internals, what not to do, when not to use it... etc. etc. This is going to be a deep dive session and be prepared to go under the hoods and get your hands dirty. The other good news is that this is going to be a NO PPT session. I am planning to talk about

• how the SQL Server process hosts the CLR (there is a significant difference from the way CLR hosting worked in .net 1.1) 
• The HostProtectionAttribute and its implications
• What you can do with your CLR code and what you shouldn;t be attempting.
• Performance implications considering various scenerios in comparision with T-SQL
• User-Defined Types - what u can do with them and what you shouldn;t do.

Session 2 :  Language Integrated Natural Query (LINQ). LINQ, is one of the exciting new features that is expected to be fully available in the next release of the .net framework. So this is not something that you will be able to implement right away in your apps, but nevertheless, its a wonderful set of extensions to your programming language that will change the way you access and work with data. If you want to be in tune with the future, then this is a not-to-be-missed topic. As usual with all my talks, i will be packing this session with lots and lots of demos and code samples and keeping the ppts to the bare minimum.

Session 3 : Biztalk 2006 - Whats in it for developers. Now since the last couple of years, i seem to have fallen in love with BizTalk. I just love the way it works, the way it simplifies so many things for developers, love the way you go about developing solutions using it.... love everything about it. And going by market trends in the last couple of months, there seem to be a lot of people sharing my passion. Interest in BTS has been growing day by day. Infact Gartner predicts that EAI and BPM are going to be the buzzwords of tomorrow and the technologies expected to be most in demand.

I have been in a delimaa regarding the audience profile to target for this session. should i assume the audience has already worked on BTS 2004 and wants to know whats new in 2006. or should i assume that a majority of the audience is new to BTS and would like to know what's in it for developers. I have decided to take a middle ground.

I am going to follow a case-study based approach for this session. The case study will be structured to cater to both these groups of audiences. It will give newcomers an idea of bts can do and hopefully the experienced guys will take away some additional knowledge of Business Rules Engine, Business Activity Monitoring, Flat File Processing, Exception handling, Web Service integration etc.  will post more details on the case study that i will be planning.

I would love to hear from you all regarding the content planned for these sessions. if you feel that you would like me to cover some other topics, i would love to include it (if possible within the timeframe).