I don't know about the other speakers, but Brendon and I are coming up with a brand new presentation for Code Camp.  This involves us coming up with a topic (done), an outline for the presentation (done - thanks Brendon), a slide show to keep us on track (mostly done - fine tuning still going on), some canned demos in case time gets to us (we're still working on these - more comments below), and practice some other demos so we can do some live coding but not look like morons when stuff doesn't work (still doing these as well).  We've been working/watching webcast/reading books and MSDN articles for a while now.  We've been shuffling the slide deck back and forth between us for additions and subtractions.  We even got together last night (not easy to do b/c we both work a lot and Brendon lives in northern BFE where I live in Atlanta) and worked from 7pm to midnight.  I'd like to say we're ready except for some last minute demo coding and a bit more polish on the slide show (take a few slides out and add a few new ones).  We're mostly there and if I had to drop everything and give the presentation right now, I wouldn't be embarrassed for myself.

One thing - has anyone had problems with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and the SQL Express product?  I can't seem to connect to my SQL Server, so I can't create or attach a database.  This means I am not going to be able to demo any kind of data binding (except from XML).  I installed everything on the CD except the J# stuff (personally no interest in Java syntax) and got no errors during the install.  I did notice that there are no useful GUI SQL tools that came with the Express edition (no management studio or query analyzer tool) but I'm comfortable with OSQL so that's not a problem.  But I can't get any tool (OSQL, VS2005 Datbase Explorer, etc) to connect without timing out.  Thoughts?  Help!

-- Matt Ranlett

UPDATE - Brendon found the problem.  SQL Express installs a named instance of SQL Server, so you can't just connect to the (local) server.  You need to connect to (local)\SQLExpress or .\SQLExpress.  Once you do that, everything works.