Couple days ago I tried to answet some question about time calculation. I needed to calculate the difference between two dates with the interval of week. I was really surprised when it appeared that DATEDIFF function does not work properly. It seems that DATEDIFF always takes Sunday as the first day of the week. It was probably coded like that to make this function deterministic. So you can change DATEFIRST and the results of DATEDIFF will remain the same. IMO, there is no excuse for bugs (yeah! I call it a bug!) like that. Even if someone just wanted to make something deterministic... Maybe there should be DATEDIFF2 (the nondeterministic one)???

 

I have described this problem: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=239958.

Time for some summary of these exciting days. The conference was nice. I really enjoyed the community. I met a lot of new friends from many countries. But... I am a little disappointed with sessions. Sometimes they were based on demos from TechEd 2003. Last year in Amsterdam the food was better and lunches were better organized. However, Barcelona is the best place for events like this. The city has its unique beauty. And the conference centers in Barcelona are huge. I wish we had places like this in Poland. My opinion: good work Microsoft Polska (!), MTS this year was not a TechEd yet, but I was positively surprised. On my way back I just wanted to see my family again. I was a little tired. A week was enough.

Friday was my last day in Barcelona. In the evening me and my Polish pals took the tourists bus and visited some nice places in Barcelona to say goodbye to this wonderful city. I hope to be here again next year! Some other photos below.

Hands-on labs today were full of people. We had to work hard :-) People are interested mainly in AJAX and XLinq which are very new to me. I visited some labs on WPF and I must say it's very impressive (some 3D animations, advanced graphics, all made by just writing some XML code). In the Evening we had our South African-German-Polish dinner :-) See some photos below.

Wednesday was a day full of work. I started at 10 A.M. with Ask The Experts slot. People in Europe have the same problems and questions as Polish users. Then after the lunch I had my hands-on labs proctoring slot. Lots of people were interested in doing some labs on XLinq and AJAX. We had always something to do at this time.

 

On Wednesday evening we visited the center of Barcelona. We had a dinner in 4 Gates restaurant (I'm not quite sure of this name, but it's one of the finest places to eat in Barcelona). Then we visited Ginger (just a place to drink some wine :-)). It was really nice evening. I put some photos below.

This day was a technology day. The day started with Key Note. Simon Brown and Eric Rudder were speakers. The youngest MCP on this planet (10 years old lady from Pakistan) was invited to the stage. I was on two sessions about SQL Server. Honestly, I was rather disappointed with them... But maybe I expect too much. The Exhibition Hall was opened also yesterday. Lots of gadgets (t-shirts, pens and other stuff). I tried to win some drawings (Dell laptop and XBox 360) but this time I wasn't lucky :-)

Yesterday I was invited by Karen and Candice (very important persons from MVP program :-)) to MVP Party. The party was great - lots of famous people, tons of tasty food, jokes, photos, visit cards and so on. It was a pleasure to meet a few Polish MVPs there also. I put some picutres made during this evening (and one from the next morning).

And so I'm in Barcelona. I live in a not very expensive flat (30 EURO per night) near to CCIB (the conference center). Today is a pre-conference day. Some long running sessions (I choose SQL Server of course). I don't work as a proctor today. I know my schedule - I am busy everyday (I'm proctoring and answering questions at Ask The Experts). I really enjoy being here. I put some photos I made this morning on my way to CCIB.

Yesterday I passed two exams (070-536 and 070-528) that gave me another certificate - MCTS: Web Developer. The exams were fairly easy to pass. Nothing special. Short questions, many with sigle answer.