Party day! But more about that later. The first session I attended was 21st Century Networking by the ever entertaining Steve Riley. Suggested that we should approach all business applications like we do email - it's too important NOT to be available anywhere, anytime from any machine. He suggests a combincation of IPv6, IPsec, NAP, and group policy to build a replacement for VPN gateways.. His blog explains his step by step plan: http://blogs.technet.com/steriley/
Developing an Active Directory Disaster Recovery Plan was a little disappointing - I was expecting a technical how to on what to do if AD goes down, instead we got a session on DR planning and assessing risk.
I attended an MVP session on ADO.NET data services. Our developers are working on a project needing synchronisation and I thought this would be a good start. I felt a bit sorry for Angel, the awesome presenter. He had just two of us in the room to start with and both of us had blank looks as he explained JSON, ATOM and REST. The other guy was a systems admin and I realised how far behind I am in the developer world after not being in it for the past several years. However, the new EDM tools look very useful and make coding against databases much simpler. I then trotted off to a lab to exercise my new found knowledge and found the ADO.NET data services lab very useful (once I could get a development lab PC - they were popular!)
IE8 Application Compatibility - What Every Developer Needs to Know to Get Ready was very useful and gave some good tips about using meta tags in order to start using IE8 without having to ensure that all your pages are compatible. Basically you can tell each site or page which version of IE to render the page in. Go -on, download IE8 - I know you want to! - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx. (if you are on XP still, upgrade to SP3 first)
Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization, formerly from Kidaro went over Microsoft's answer to VMWare VDI - I gotta say I am not convinced that they have caught up just yet. Also the desktop optimisation kit which contains the virtualisation product is only available to software assurance customers.
The party was held on site this year. I seem to always miss the Lunar Park, Movie World parties - whenever I have gone it's been the nightclub ones. This was kind of similar without the dancing or the free mixed drinks on offer (maybe a good thing!) The theme was carnival and the place was decked out like a 1930s fair complete with sideshow alley. I was thrilled to actually win on one of the games (getting balls into a bucket) and proudly showed off my prize - a sparkly pink cowboy hat. (We shall not talk of my lack of prowess at the pinball machine). There were also several boys (as there are at Tech Ed) who were similarly chuffed with their pink sparkly cowboy hats. Ah, techs - you will say one thing for 'em - they really don't care what other people think! Overhead: "What's the point of a party with 3000 guys and no chicks. They could have at least bussed in some strippers." Ladies, we have some way to go!
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They did have "xbox cheerleaders" the guys could get their photo with at teched 2 years ago.
Yeah - I remember that! It was so crowded in there and I ended up having to leave after getting man handled once or twice. There were some actually very nice boys at the just gone Tech Ed (not the ones who thought strippers were an essential party trick) - I was kind of sorry I couldn't bring along my gorgeous little sister who would have loved it :)
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