Read the release announcement in the PS blog. The English download is here. Now that is a CLI!

The final SQL Server-related post for today: Working with tempdb in SQL Server 2005.

Another noteable tidbit from the "Achieving High Availability with SQL Server 2005" preconference session: the whitepaper Partitioned Tables and Indexes in SQL Server 2005.

Currently listening to the half-day preconference session "Achieving High Availability with SQL Server 2005" by Kimberly Tripp. Interesting tidbit for decreasing downtime for operational tasks (like create database or restore): Instant File Initialization. The figures really point to huge time savings! Quite a selling point for Enterprise Edition of SQL Server.

Namely Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals. This needs either SQL Server Enterprise or Developer Edition. Of course I had Standard and Express on my machine only...

A book store at a conference always adds weight to my luggage and back home gets me into trouble with my already (again) limited space on the bookshelf. So this time I 'restrained' myself and got myself 'only' four books: Hunting Security Bugs, Microsoft Solutions Framework Essentials, Dynamics of Software Development 2006 Edition and Pro VSTS 2005 Application Development. I'm especially looking forward to Hunting Security Bugs.

This Q&A item is part of the current MSDN magazine's Security Brief's column by Keith Brown. I am pretty sure that this problem will rear its head sooner or later on every developers machine, that's why I am 'pinning' the link in my blog for my own reference too.

It's two weeks in Barcelona for me - and for IT Forum, I am really doing ask-the-experts for Visual Studio Team System!

Being ATE (Ask the Experts) means that you cannot go each and every session you would like to. As a reminder for myself here is the list of sessions I made it to:

• ARC305: Connected Systems Part 2: Logic
• OFF303: VSTO 2005 SE
• SQL402: Implementing the Service-Oriented Database Architecture with SQL Server
• ARC304: Connected Systems Part 4: Data
• ARC201: Patterns and Anti-Patterns for SOA
• DEV314: Building Rule-Based Systems in WF
• ARC302: Connected Systems Part 5: Identity and Access Management
• DEV322: Unit Testing Best Practices
• DEV360: Windows PowerShell
• DEV302: Microsoft XNA and the Future of Game Development
• DEV366: Boost Your Data-Driven Application Development using SQL Server Centric .NET Code Generator (Olymars)

The only session to be rated "eminently forgettable" was DEV322. Well, at least I got to read my emails... The top-rated session definitely was Bob Beauchemin's SQL402, which kind of was an interesting session to go to before ARC304. Great fun was Rob Miles' XNA talk (this session doesn't fit the pattern of my interest, does it?).

There are a couple of sessions I missed, but I'll watch those once the post-conference DVDs have landed.

The Windows Vista Security Guide provides recommendations and tools to further harden Windows Vista. Well, go get it.