I couldn't resist sharing this.  I spent a mid-size chunk of my life playing Half Life and its related properties.  It now appears to be bleeding out into the real world:

   http://www.joystiq.com/2008/09/09/terrible-news-gordon-freeman-spotted-near-large-hadron-collider/

A very insightful bit of writing by Richar Seroter on what happens to BizTalk Web Service receive locations when the DB goes bye bye. When the SQL Server goes off line, take down the IIS service on your BizTalk servers.  This is really kind of scary.  When the SQL Server goes offline, the BizTalk web services return 202's which is just as good as a 200 to most - and the message is lost.  I need to think this one through and see how to deal with it.  We don't lose our database alot, but it has gone offline on enough occasions to make this a real concern.  Anybody have expereince handling this one?

Thanks to Joe Healy for passing on the announcement from Stan Kennedy.  On October 1st, there will be the first meeting of the Central Florida BizTalk User Group in Tampa.  A bit of a hall, but I will be attempting the trip.  Anyoneinterested in car pooling?

Since getting back from TechEd things have been a bit crazy.  The rest of the week there was a blast.  I got to meet many more community members and catch some really interesting presentations.  I am currently fascinated with the SQL Server 2008 Data Mining tools and am in search of a good problem.   I'd like to turn this into a presentation for the local User Group. 

One of the other highlights was using the Certification Testing at the conference.  After sorting out some issues with the name on my certification, I was able to finally get this logo:

That was not a pleasant test.  The tool just has so many facets to it and it's really impossible to have used all of them.  But the test prep senter at the conference and some reading got me a pass on the first try.

When: Wednesday June 11, 2008 @ 6:30PM
Where: Space Coast Credit Union Corp Headquarters

Want to know what you need to do to keep your DBA happy and make your application run really fast? Wondering if stored procedures are really faster than dynamic sql? Need some good guidelines for adding indexes? We'll spend an hour talking about performance in this very interactive presentation.

Andy Warren of End to End Training will be speaking.

Register if you plan to attend this event

Then will be pizza and magazines available for those who attend. We will be raffleing off a Technet plus subscription at the end of the meeting. 

The day started out with the key note by Bill Gates.  Very nice speech on the focus of their development efforts for the years to come.  We were also treated to the director's cut of the Bill Gates' Last Day video.

I've made some new friends.

Drank my MSDN Subscription's worht of Beer at Howl at The Moon for Geekfest 2008.  It was a nice time and I got to meet many more of the folks from the Florida .Net Communities.