last week I visited the unique Chawkandi Tombs outside of Karachi. The tombs are from the 15th to 18th century and very elaborate. The photos do not do they justice, they span for over 3 km. Here are the photos:

These are what most look like:

Here is one shaped like a mosque:

Did you notice the Don Box is among the people for sale on eBay at the Charity Auction? Go bid:http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

I just got home from Karachi and have discovered several warm messages in my inbox from people who went to the PDC and saw me speak. To all of you, THANK YOU for the kind words. My time in Pakistan was only 3 days, but it was very special. I have my plaque on my desk in my office.

And to all of you who left comments in my blog about Mr. Clemens, thanks, I would have paid a few hundred rupees to see the look on his face. :)

If there is another PDC next year I will be back, my experience was great.

I encourage people to visit to Pakistan, it is a wonderful country with very warm people.

The 3rd Annual Pakistan Developers Conference is under way here in Karachi! I had a free day in Karachi to enjoy the city and weather. Went and purchased a carpet and visited the unique Chawkandi Tombs outside of Karachi. The tombs are from the 15th to 18th century and very elaborate. The photos do not do they justice, they span for over 3 km.

The first Grok Talks are published, check them out here!

 I will be speaking at the 3^rd Annual Pakistan developers Conference in Karachi, Pakistan next week. This is a great event with usually 5,000+ developers. I will be speaking on security, and new SQL Server 2005 features.

My friends question my sanity when I tell them that I am headed to Pakistan, a potentially dangerous place with Al-Qaeda cells running around. They say “Why bother, why not speak somewhere safe, like the USA or Europe?”

Microsoft makes a statement by holding a conference in a developing country, a country that many westerns are willing to write it off. I am making the same statement; I believe the only way for Pakistan to beat back Al-Qaeda and make peace with India is to get on board with globalization and to create economic opportunity for its citizens. The way to do this is with jobs. The road to jobs starts with training and conferences. Give someone a chance to get a job, give them hope.  If India can be an outsourcing center for the West, why can’t Pakistan? I am traveling to Pakistan to help them get there. Al-Qaeda can’t recruit an employed .NET developer

Peace through .NET. Go figure.

Help promote the TechEd Speaker Auction!

Put this image on your website along with the link to the auction

 http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

For some reason they trusted me to do the first one. It went very well: Ranking and Windowing Functions in SQL Server 2005. After editing, you can view it here: http://www.groktalk.net/blog/

SQL Sever 2005 will ship on NOvember 7th. It has been a long time, worth the wait. Go get the current beta, released today: http://msdn.microsoft.com/

Tuesday 11:25 AM: Using Ranking and Windowing Functions in SQL Server 2005

SQL Server 2005 adds the functionality of a Ranking expression that can be added to your resultset that is based on a ranking algorithm being applied to a column that you specify. This will come in handy in .NET applications for paging and sorting in a grid as well as many other scenarios. We will explore the ROW_NUMBER() function which assigns a running count to each row and compare it to RANK() and DENSE_RANK(). Use these functions to solve complex SQL Problems. Then we will look at custom percentile ranking using NTILE() and look at business and adacemic applications of NTILE. Lastly we will apply windowing functions to all of the 4 ranking functions with PARTITION BY to perform hard code aggregate functions

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

Come to mine today: