Ok, so I admit that I’m a little behind the curve on some of the technology that is available right now but all that is about to change. For my birthday, my wife presented me with a new Seagate 80GB hard drive which I am proud to say, installed without any problem. As I was installing the drive, I even decided that with the CD burner and a 256MB flash drive, I no longer needed the floppy drive installed so I’m finally running without a 3.5″ drive on all of my computers.

The reason I asked my wife for a new hard drive is so I could set up my system for dual boot with a developer license of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and load other software such as SQL Server 2005 Beta 1 and Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 so I could get myself up to speed on the upcoming technology. I don’t have everything installed yet since I still have to download the MSDN portion of Visual Studio but what I have installed so far impresses me beyond my wildest dreams.

Even though I have been reading some about SQL Server 2005 tonight was my first exposure to it and therefore, it was my experience with SQL Server Enterprise Studio. I must say that so far I like what MS has done. The whole Visual Studio-like interface seems to be extremely intuitive and easy to use from what I have looked at. I know that I have barely scratched the surface of the new tools and I am also left wondering how many DBAs will like the extreme change.

In all honesty, tonight was also my first exposure to Windows 2003 Server and I am also impressed with it. I know that the product has been available for some time but I have not had access to any resource to dig in and fiddle around. I am looking forward to playing around with IIS6 and many of the other enhancements over Windows 2000 though I’m really primarily interested in SQL Server 2005.

As I was opening the box in preparation to install the new drive, I asked my wife if she realized that the present meant I was going to disappear into my home office more than I usually do since she was opening the door for me to install a shload of new “toys,” She said she did but we’ll see! As I learn more about SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 I’ll be sure to post it here.