What a great time yesterday.. The first session was at 8:30. It was "SQL Server 2008 for Developers" given by Sam Nasr. He did a great job explaining some of the new features in 2008. There are new data types one that was discussed was the new HIERARCHYID. You could use this to create org charts. He also covered the ability to use group by sets. This would allow you to define multiple 'sets' of grouping columns. I won a 1 GB "RedGate" jump drive.

The second session was "Linq to SQL" by Joshua Clark. It was his first time doing a presentation, you could tell he was nervous. I still think he did a great job. The Linq product is very neat. It adds the ability to see what data is being returned in the web page during design. It also ueses intellisense right back to the SQL database to reference columns in a table or Stored procedures. It also recognise and relationships between tables. I won at T-Shirt at the end of this one.

The third session was "Well Isn't that Spatial" by Jason Follas. I had no idea what this was about.. It blew me away. Spatial is a new data type. Here is his blog post about Spatial