So I was awake late last night and, lo and behold, there was a web link for Denali CTP3 posted on Twitter. Downloaded and installed it. Brought it up and looked for a few new items (features) announced at SQLPASS last year and TechEd US 2011 this year that should be there. They were. Maybe it was late, but I did notice a few things along the way. So maybe they're only interesting to me.
I installed on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (as the release notes suggested) and, on the "choose your service account" page, the well-known Service SIDs appeared. No need to change 'em, unless you're planning to turn off service SIDs. See my posting on Service SIDs and SQL Server here.
From there, after typing in "declare @g geometry = 'POINT(0 0)';" in a query window for good measure, I proceeded to the log viewer window. And was rewarded with the following messages:
CLR Version v4.0.30319 loaded.
Commmon language runtime (CLR) functionality initialized using CLR version v4.0.30319 from C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\
So SQLCLR is using .NET 4.0 now, eh? That was a feature on no one's radar. Not even my list… That seems to be a long sought-after feature, judging from the complaints on the SQLCLR forum (called .NET Framework Inside SQL Server).
From there, I meandered up to the Extended Events folder, clicked on sessions and right-clicked on the system_health session, already installed as usual. There's a nice selection "Watch Live Data"… the long-sought after Extended Events GUI. And a nice "New Session Wizard" and "New Session" (for big kids), off the Session folder. Nice.
By then it was around 3am. Time for sleeping…I'll write about this tomorrow. And so I did, just now. Enjoy.
@bobbeauch