Connected Systems Developer Competition Winners

Last fall, I was fortunate enough to be a finalist in the Connected Systems Developer Competition. As part of that, I was flown to San Francisco and attended a fancy dinner for the 15 (or was that changed to 17? I forget) finalists, plus I got to attend the Joint Launch Event for VS2005/SQL2005/Biztalk2006, plus I was awarded a MSDN subscription. That's a lot of benefit for just writing some code (that I now show off as part of my SQLCLR talk).

The point of the finalist dinner, though, was to announce the actual winners of the contest. The June 2006 issue of MSDN Magazine has a sponsored insert starting on page 60 that highlights those winners, who walked away with at least $15,000 (the grand-prize winner took home a cool $50,000).

So, where did these people sit in relation to me at the table? John Arnold was across the table to my left. Marc-Donald Gagne was beside me to my left. Hans-Peter Haberlandner was across the table from me. Wolfgang Portugaller was across the table to my right. Michael Voigt was sitting beside me to my right. So, if you're following along at home, everyone on my end of the table who was sitting around me took some cash home (but I did not)! I'm apparently the opposite of The Cooler!

Of interesting note: Wolfgang Portugaller and Hans-Peter Haberlandner, who submitted Persistor.NET (serializes object graphs to SQL Server), were also the MCP category winners, which means that they were awarded a session at TechEd. I'll probably stop by this one:

SQL Server 2005: Storing Complex Managed Objects
Day/Time: Monday, June 12 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM
Room: 259 AB
Speaker(s): Hans-Peter Haberlandner, Wolfgang Portugaller

Object-oriented programming is state-of-the-art in software development today. When it comes to persistence, developers are often confronted with RDBMS lacking some of the rich features of the object-oriented paradigm. This session explains significant characteristics of persistence solutions and compares existing options. A specific category of persistence solutions which fully supports the object-oriented paradigm based on the mandatory features as specified in the "Object Oriented Database Management System Manifesto" is highlighted. To demonstrate these features Persistor.NET (www.persitor.net) is used together with SQL Server 2005.

Track(s): Database Development and Administration
Session Type(s): Breakout Session
Session Level(s): 300