Well I spent the day at the Welcome Trust today for the launch of Microsoft SQL 2008 (as well as Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008) and I am writing this while trying to get our keynote for Mix08 finished...

It was full day that started with a briefing from Gordon Fraser, UK MD of Microsoft, then the US team gave us some of the details of what the products had on offer. We had a bite to eat with Gordon and Paul Curtis from easyJet (see picture)

The highlight of the day for me was customer demos, forget what Microsoft say about things... lets see what the customers have done with the products, kinda selfish here as we had designed and developed one of the demos for easyJet.

We have been working with easyJet for the last 18 months on a number of cool projects including this latest POC (proof of concept in Microsoft speak). The work is based around what easyJet could look like in the future, what would a customer journey experience be? Could easyJet become a travel portal rather than a booking engine? these were some of the questions we were trying to answer, and according to the user test feedback we succeeded.

For the POC we used a good chunk of Silverlight 2.0, some AJAX controls on a Virtual Earth map and served it up with some cool geo spatial features from SQL2008. This allows users to define tourist attractions 10 minutes (or however far you want to walk) from your hotel based a predefined polygon of information. A more detailed technical post will follow as I am not a developer (as most people at Microsoft will testify) but what the technology allows us to do is create a great user experience, and that's what matters at the end of the day.

There was also a very cool demo by a Profesor and a Doctor from Cambridge University, looking at modeling data from 1820. Very cool demo.

We then ended with a live link up to Steve Balmers keynote in the States.