Richard gave a great presentation yesterday. As a developer, I learnt a lot about SQL Server. If you are interested the sample code from his session is located here. I highly recommend having Richard out to your user group, he is a great presenter with a very laid back style.

As always, if there is anything you would like to see improved at Edmug or if there is a speaker you would like to see let us know and we will do our best to make it happen.

If you have some spare time tonight, come out to the Edmonton .NET User Group meeting at the Edmonton Public Library downtown. Richard Campbell (from Dot Net Rocks) will be presenting on SQL Server Tips and Techniques. This talk has been popular with other user groups so it should be a good time.

We will also be giving out free copies of asp.netPRO magazine to everyone and you will also have a chance to win free swag and meet other members of the Edmonton development community.

Last weekend my Dad and I went to the 2nd annual West Edmonton Mall Grand Prix presented by the Brick at JAGflo speedway...I think they need to have less sponsors next year. Here is my recap of the race weekend.

During the 1st round of qualifying, Sebastian Bourdais set the best qualifying time with a time of 59.895 seconds right behind him was rival Paul Tracy with a time of 1:00.067.

The 3rd practice session was an interesting one with half of the drivers breaking the minute mark. The rookies Dan Clarke and Katherine Legge were both broke the minute mark in what ended up being their best times of the weekend. Katherine also broke the minute mark in the second qualifying round but the time didn't count because of a crash on the track.

 

In the second qualifying session, Bourdais once again had the best time of the session coming in at 58.560, with that time he also beat the track record set last year by A.J. Allmendinger. A big surprise was rookie Will Power's time of 59.460 which ended up being good enough for the 6th spot on the grid.

At the start of the race my money was on Sebastian Bourdais and Paul Tracy to have an incident  in the first turn but it ended up being Cristiano da Matta who ended up going into the tires.  Here is a low quality video of the first turn from my camera and a couple photos of the result:

First turn video

My money was on Nelson Philippe to win the race but he ended up crashing late in the race on turn 7.

 

The turning point of the race was when Justin Wilson beat Paul Tracy out of the pits, he narrowly avoided beating him out but it proved to be worth it. I was actually surprised when Wilson passed Bourdais for first on the back straight away, he made Bourdais look like he was lap traffic and ended up taking the checkered flag. Here is his celebration.

I have a lot more pictures up over at Flickr if you want to check out some good shots of the Atantic race and some additional champ car pictures from the weekend. Also, Mack has a recap of the weekend as well.

My summer is now officially over. I must've been watching too much soccer because last Wednesday while playing hockey, I turned my foot sideways to block a shot and the shot broke my foot. I went for x-rays last Thursday and today (Monday) they finally let me know that my foot was broken and indeed I did need a cast.

I was just catching up on my blog reading tonight and noticed that Scott Hanselman put up a link to WatirMaker rewritten in Ruby. Sweet!

If you aren't familiar with it, WatirMaker will record your mouse clicks and key presses in the internet browser and save them into a Ruby script which you can then rerun. It is a great way to test your UI and automate common actions that you may do with your app. I always end up getting back bugs from QA where it is painful trying to reproduce them but with WatirMaker I can reproduce it once, make my fix and then have the saved script for the next time I modify that page.

I often hear about a lot of people complaining that you can't unit test the UI but Watir can make sure that certain things appear on the page and you can use assertions just like you can with NUnit. So no more complaining that you can't test the UI!

It is going to be fun to try this our at work tomorrow check it out here: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WatirMakerWrittenAgainInRuby.aspx

Today, Steve Yzerman retired. In my opinion he was the best player to ever put on a pair of skates and pick up a hockey stick.

I remember growing up watching Yzerman and seeing something in him that other hockey players didn't seem to have and that is what I strived to do as a hockey player and in life. The class and leadership that Yzerman showed both on and off the ice make him a perfect role model and I will miss watching him on get the job done on the ice.

I was fortunate to see his last game in the NHL against the Oilers and you can bet that the ticket stubs  and programs will be framed and added to my Steve Yzerman memorabilia collection. Watching Yzerman skate off the ice and fade away into the visitors tunnel after they had just been beaten by the Oilers is an image that will stick with me until the day I die: