Code camps are a completely developer oriented endeavor organized and hosted by the local .Net community. There are some fantastic speakers and sessions scheduled that I am really looking foward to. I attended the last Alabama code camp that was held in Birmingham, AL and gave a presentation on the WiX Toolkit and had a great time.

I highly recommend attending if you want to further your skills and expand your knowledge of Microsoft’s .Net framework and SQL Server DBMS. It is also a great networking opportunity to meet your fellow developers in the community (plus to sweeten the deal, they usually have tons of giveaways at the end of the day).

If you are planning on attending, be sure and register so that they can correctly estimate how much food to have on hand for lunch.

Looks like with Oracle’s recent announcement all of the big names in the commercial database market have free versions that can be used in production environments. There is Sybase ASE Express Edition for Linux, Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, and Oracle Database 10g Express Edition.

Here’s a short feature comparison on the very basic stats.

Oracle Database 10g Express Edition
4 GB of data
1 CPU
1 GB of RAM
One instance per server
Downloads For Windows or Linux

Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
4 GB of data
1 CPU
1 GB of RAM
Windows Only

Sybase ASE Express Edition for Linux
5 GB of data
1 CPU
2 GB of RAM
Linux

Each of these databases are exceptional pieces of technology. I have worked mainly with Oracle and SQL Server and am really blown away with the features that have been packed into Oracle 10g and SQL Server 2005. I think these moves by the commercial database companies to release free versions of their software could really have an impact on the open source databases typically used to build small to medium sized databases on the cheap. We’ll see how it affects their future.

Also, the Alabama .Net Code Camp this past weekend went great. I’ll have a post tomorrow summarizing things and posting a link to the files from my presentation.

The first meeting of LANUG (the moniker given to the Lower Alabama .Net Users Group) was a great success with around 27 in attendance. There were some new faces and quite a few friends and acquaintances I have met over the years. Some of the companies that had employees in attendance were: ACO, STI, Morrison’s, Dawson Engineering, and of course yours truly from DailyAccess Corporation.

Microsoft’s Developer Evangelist for the South East region, Joe Healy, was on hand to give a presentation of some of the new features in Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. I must say that the upcoming features are very exciting. ASP.Net 2.0 is an incredible language and platform and definitely is well ahead of the other technologies out there.

Visual Studio 2005 brings some great new features for VB.Net and C# developers including Edit and Continue (allows one to alter variables and add code during execution in Debug mode), incredible refactoring support (very similar to what exists for Java in Eclipse), and Click Once deployment (adds smart client capabilities to apps to allow them to update themselves to the latest version via the internet seamlessly for the user).

SQL Server 2005 has an incredible number of new features, we were able to only cover a few but they were awesome. The new version adds incredible XML support right into the database (very similar to what Oracle 9i and up have with SQLX and the XML SDK’s in PL/SQL). There is also the ability to call .Net managed code functions inside stored procedures and standard SQL queries. This allows one to have the option of writing functions in a .Net language versus T-SQL which depending on what is needed can make things much easier (have you tried to split a string in T-SQL based on a delimiter??? It’s one line in C#). The example that Joe gave of this feature was the Great Circle algorithm with GPS coordinates. (Something I also saw this week, is that IBM’s DB2 and Oracle’s 10gR2 on Windows have support for this type of functionality)

I have to say that Joe Healy is one of the best presenters I have seen in awhile. He had great energy, was comfortable in front of a crowd, and had great contents (more code than powerpoint which is a big plus). I would highly recommend checking him out if you have the opportunity to hear him speak. He also gave out some great books as door prizes (unfortunately I was not a winner of any of the texts, but Casey won a VB.Net book)

Here are links to the code samples that Joe used from his site DevFish.Net.

What’s new and cool in VS2005 – Powerpoint, SQL2005 GPS functions for bearing and Great Circle Distance, stored procedure and view definitions. Visual Studio 2005 Beta2 project using Virtual Earth.

Upcoming .Net Events
October 29, 2005 – Birmingham, AL – Alabama Code Camp 2005

November 25, 2005 – Atlanta, GA – Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 Launch Event

November 25, 2005 – Mobile, AL – LANUG Meeting Two – Speakers TBD

December 13, 2005 – Birmingham, AL – Satellite Launch Event for Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005