B# .NET Blog : TechEd 2005 Europe

TechEd 2005 Europe - Some photos

bart — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 06:42:00 GMT

I made a selection of my photos of TechEd 2005 Europe @ Amsterdam, which can be found over here: http://spaces.msn.com/members/bartdesmet/. Enjoy!

TechEd 2005 Europe - the rest of the story

bart — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 07:05:00 GMT

TechEd 2005 Europe has come to an end yesterday. In my opinion it was the best TechEd I have attended in the last three years, maybe partially due to the great stuff (SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk 2006) coming up this fall. It was also a very busy week, so heavy I had to take it a bit easy today (on Wednesday night I didn't go to bed and on Thursday night after the TechEd party it was about 4 AM to see my bed :o). So, that's the primary reason why the posts of the last couple of days have been deferred a bit. Here it is now (grabbed from some Notepad random through files):

Thursday morning (very early = about 6 AM in the morning)

Although I had no ATE shift yesterday, I've the feeling it was the most busy day for me at the event. Well, in fact it all started Wednesday evening with a pretty big schedule conflict: 3 parties on one evening is far too much. So, I decided to attend two of those, being the SQL Server 2005 party at Jimmy Woo's in the center of Amsterdam and the Belgian country drink afterwards at “De Rode Hoed” (which is the dutch for ... Red Hat :o oink) in the Keizersgracht. Great music and nice talks with a bunch of people ... what else do you want? At the end of the Belgian party I met a nice guy coming from Belgium too (well, chances are pretty high to meet someone from your own country at the country drink ;-)), so we ended up walking to our hotels at the other side of Amsterdam during a pretty long evening walk - fortunately I'm a pretty good navigator through foreign cities - while talking about a bunch of technology stuff and what to expect in the upcoming years on the field of Microsoft-related technology (well, geekiness is binary in my opinion: or you have it compeletely or you don't :d). Nice experience to chat for a couple of hours on a crossroad somewhere in Amsterdam where our roads to the hotels did split. We left each other at 3:18 AM exactly, about 3:50 AM I arrived in my hotel and I decided to start writing this blog post. Unfortunately I don't have wireless internet access over here in the hotel, so Notepad seems to be the best solution to put these random thoughts on file :-).

Friday morning

Wednesday was a heavy day, Thursday definitely was too. Back in my hotel, I'm writing this stuff again in the early morning (although I plan to go to bed for a couple of hours in a moment). In fact, the night ended the same way as it did yesterday: "a pretty long evening walk while talking about a bunch of technology stuff and what to expect in the upcoming years on the field of Microsoft-related technology" with the same guy I met again at the end of the TechEd 2005 party which was the greatest I've ever seen in the last three years. Last year, it actually was influenced by the WK football (or something like that, I'm not a huge sports fan actually). This year's party covered the "Scissor Sisters" and the band "NU2" with great music and a lot of fun (soccer game, pool, etc). Now, let's go back to the serious stuff. Thursday was my day off at the ATE booth for Virtual Server, so I decided to participate in a lot of sessions today, although I had some side-meetings to attend too. In the early morning after two croissants and 0 hours of sleep, I attended David Platt's session on the new stuff coming up in .NET Framework v2.0. Although it was not that new for me, David gave a great overview of the various technologies coming up. At 10:15 AM I couldn't attend a session unfortunately as I had other stuff to do; although I reviewed a couple of presentations which I grabbed from the mseventseurope website during the lunch break (Euan's session on "SQL Server 2005 End to End: Database Development", "Indigo Under the Hood", "Asynchronous Pages in ASP.NET 2.0" and "Event-Driven Architectures"). It actually was the first timeslot I feeled releaved because I couldn't attend a session: there were so many sessions than it would have been a pain in the *** to take one. Fortunately, attendees will all receive a post conference DVD with all the sessions in WMV format (h). Later on, I attended Kimberly Tripp's sessions on "VLDB Availability and Recovery Strategies for SQL Server 2005" (with a pretty cool demo using 4 USB keys to simulate a VLDB database :d) and "Understanding Transaction Isolation in SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005". As always, sessions by Kimberly are great ones. I guess I'll rewatch these later on the DVD again. Further on the database track, I went to take a look at the session of Michael Rys on "Building Distributed Applications using SQL Server 2005 Service Broker". Although the session covered a bunch of stuff that's Service Broker capable of doing, I had the feeling that I knew almost everything of it already, so I'd rather prefer a level 400 session on that topic (but then other people would have said, what the hell is he talking about ;-)). So, I did a short review of the session booklet for level 400 sessions and came to the conclusion that the number of level-400s was rather low, which will be one of my feedbacks later on. During the same timeslot, Steve Riley was presenting his session "Security Policies? Ugh, Just Give Me a Firewall" which will have been undoubtly great again. As the matter in fact I saw it on IT Forum in November 2004 already, but if you didn't see it already I'd recommend to review it on the post-con DVD. And then it was time for the party of course :-). I'll post photos later on via my website (update: these - 222 in total - will come soon on my MSN Space, I'll post about this later on).

More stuff will be posted soon, talking about the sessions I attended on Friday and some things I'll be doing in the next couple of weeks. One last thing maybe: I just finished my studies on Informatics at the University of Ghent in June this year, with a degree of biggest distinction (exact numbers not known yet, as I couldn't attend the proclamation while being at TechEd of course :d). Some of you will know this already, for others it will be news: I do plan to continue my studies for another two years at the same university, while being actively involved in the Microsoft community and doing further consultancy and evangelization work. More info to come later on.

Virtual Server 2005 contest (nothing to win)

bart — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 00:10:00 GMT

A little challenge for you guys. Install and run Virtual Server, connect to the machines using the VMRC client. Throw away your mouse (or smash your laptop touchpad - if you still have a guarantee on it) as any real hardcode developer should have done for many years already (I tend to avoid the mouse as much as I can in fact). Now try to find a way to break out of this window to ALT-TAB to another window on your host OS (e.g. you want to swich - without a mouse - between the VRMC client in which you manage a virtual machine running ISA Server 2004 and want to swicht to a local command prompt window to see you did the configuration right to avoid ICMP ping messages coming in to the server).

Prizes: none (it's a challenge you know :p)

Tip (not useful :d): I have a blog post on the same "problem" (with a solution) in Virtual PC on http://community.bartdesmet.net/blogs/bart/archive/2005/01/11/568.aspx.

The end of the Tuesday story; the beginning of the Wednesday story

bart — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 20:24:00 GMT

Yesterday evening was a big shot actually at TechEd 2005 Europe. A bunch of people came across to see the Exhibition Hall with the revamped ATE area and the brand new Community Lounge. I guess the “Welcome Drinks” had to do a lot with it, as there was beer (now, that doesn't attract me at all as I am a 0.000% alcoholic guy :-d). And of course a lot of people were doing the usual gadget hunting (and there are many of those gadgets, yet another reason to come to TechEd ;-)). Now, I have to be honest and say that I'm guilty too, but when you're dealing this stuff you should at least know what it is (yeah right, Smetje always has an explanation, does he?).

Now, switching to today's schedule: it's very very busy actually. First I attended a couple of session on database technology, including the use of SQL Server Integration Services and SQL Server Analysis Services (“SQL Server 2005 End to End: Integrate, Analyze and Act“) by Euan Garden and Donald Farmer (hmm, these to surnames do have some match). Really amazing and super powerful stuff (data mining, cubes, reporting, integration of other data sources such as Excel, perform analysis on gathered data, etc). Afterwards I attended the session on “SQLCLR vs. T-SQL: Best Practices for Development in the Database” by Gert Drapers. This was a level 400 session but in my very opinion it was very well-explained and it covered exactly the stuff it needed to cover.

Now I'm off to find some food and then I'll be on the ATE booth 15b for Virtual Server again starting from 2PM on. The ideal place to relax (:o) to prepare for two parties coming up tonight. the Belgian Country Drink and the SQL Server 2005 party both downtown in Amsterdam somewhere.

Tuesday @ TechEd cont'd

bart — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 01:30:00 GMT

I just arrived on the ATE booth for Virtual Server for my late shift of the day (till 9:00 PM). Actually there is a “Exhibition Welcome Drinks” scheduled over here in Hall 11 at 7:00 PM.

In the last couple of hours I attended Gert Drapers' session on “SQLCLR Internals: SQL Server 2005 as a CLR Runtime Host”. Gert dit a great job explaining the inner details of how SQL Server 2005 loads and executes .NET code compiled into IL and how the underlying SQL OS uses the new ICLRRuntimeHost interface to interact with the CLR and to dictate how the CLR behaves (e.g. on the field of threading or memory allocation and synchronization). Later on I'll post in much more detail how these things work and what things such as Host Protection Attributes, blessed assemblies, the escalation policy and dynamic management and catalog views mean.

After that, I went to take a look at the "Longhorn Client Security Advancements" session by Steve Hiskley. In this session a brief overview of the various security enhancements that are planned for the Longhorn OS release was given. I won't cover this any further for now but it looks promising and I'll give you more information about these features soon when Longhorn Beta 1 hits the road later this summer.

About today's keynote at TechEd and security

bart — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 21:24:00 GMT

Time for lunch again ;-). But some blogging first. As I mentioned in the previous post, there was a keynote by Andy Lees this morning. In my opinion, the keynote gave a good general overview of the upcoming set of technologies in the next couple of months and years. Starting with Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 which will be RTMed later this year in the week of November 7th, the next big plan is of course Longhorn, Exchange 12 and Office 12. In the meantime, Windows Server 2003 R2, Virtual Server 2005 SP1 and Exchange 2003 SP2 are pinned for later this year too.

The RFID stuff I mentioned earlier was used during a demo of Visual Studio 2005 development of a smart client application that does “traffic analysis“ of the event venue. Using the gathered data, one can decide (still theoretically) e.g. to send additional ATE folks to the ATE booth because there's a lot of people out there at a given moment. Pretty cool stuff to watch.

Another demo showed the use of Exchange 2003 and Windows Mobile 5.0 to enhance security on mobile devices, another one the use of MOM 2005 to monitor heterogeneous environments (using a Sun Solaris box :o) and yet another one compared the performance of SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 and the 64-bit edition of SQL Server 2005. And of course cost analysis stuff was omnipresent too, showing clearly the cost effectiveness of rolling out SQL Server 2005 Enterprise compared to the equivalent costs of Oracle and IBM's DB/2.

Other news: all attendees will receive not only Virtual Server 2005 Enterprise Edition and SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition but a copy of Visual Studio 2005 too once it has been released. I guess November will be party time for a lot of developers :-).

After the keynote I attended Jesper's session on “The Anatomy of a Network Hack“. Jesper did a great job showing various security problems (starting with a pretty simple SQL injection attack and the dramas that such an attack can bring) during a live 4-simultaneously-running-VPC-setup demo concluding by outlining some security in depth strategies that should help to overcome these problems using 10 simple tips (okay, security is more than that, but guidelines are a good starting point to kick off with). I'll post about this topic later on in the category “Security“ on my blog. This afternoon I'm planning to attend Gert Drapers' session on the SQLCLR in SQL Server 2005. I'll keep you posted guys!

And last but not least: about the network. Everything seems to work fine, logins go pretty smooth but unfortunately access to the mseventseurope website is rather slow right now. Wondering what the exact problem is; I guess Mr. Cheeseman will come up with a nice explanation later this week (if they noticed it too :d).

Tuesday morning at TechEd

bart — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 16:46:00 GMT

After the preconference yesterday I attended the staff meeting for instructions for both speakers and ATE members. Gerd De Bruycker's (the event organizer for Microsoft EMEA, owning both TechEd and ITForum) message was loud and clear: attendees want to see their questions solved and that's where the staff (and other attendees too of course) is for. So, if you have any question whatsoever, make sure to meet us at the compeletely revamped ATE booth. I've been around in the exhibition hall this morning and I have to say: the result looks greater than ever.

Some facts and figures about this year's TechEd Europe:

6500 registered attendees
2000 attendees on the preconference (you can see clearly now the amount of people is tripled)
400+ technical sessions

Still half an hour to go to Andy Lees' keynote. More news to come soon over here ;-).

Time for the first lunch

bart — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 20:57:00 GMT

After attending a couple of preconference sessions, we're ready to go for lunch in a minute. After all, I decided to attend a part of Steve Riley's and Jesper Johansson's preconference on security, called “Be Secure: How to Build a Defense-in-Depth Strategy for your Environment - Today!”. The nice thing about preconferences is that you can taste a bit of it all ;-). For those of you attending the precon, please note that the precon materials won't be on the postcon DVD! So, if you need the stuff, go and grab the handouts for review at home later on.

One interesting new technology is called “Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP” which can be found on http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/sharedaccess/default.mspx. The technology includes a series of services and apps to make shared computers more reliable and less time-consuming to maintain. Examples of such systems are kiosks, internet cafes, shared computers in schools, etc. Some features include.

A tool called “Windows Restrictions” that's well-suited to prevent access to various parts and settings of the OS, especially useful in environments that don't have an Active Directory domain instructure.
Enhanced “Windows Accessibility” tools to help to maintain privacy on shared systems and to give users an overall familiar feeling with their (shared with other people) systems.
For those of you who know differencing disks in Virtual PC, the “Windows Disk Protection“ tool eases the maintenance of computers by throwing away chnages made to the computer since the last boot. Critical updates and antivirus updates however are maintained on the system. When shutting down the tool should ask whether to keep changes or to discard them.

To download this new piece of beta-software, follow this link. Looking for some food right now. Cheers!

Arrived at TechEd 2005

bart — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 16:09:00 GMT

Just arrived in the RAI for another TechEd. The travel yesterday went really well (Thalys), the hotel is okay (Ibis), so it's waiting for the quality of the event :-). Fingers crossed, but I've a good feeling after attending the two previous TechEd Europes.

At the registration desk, we received our TechEd 2005 bag, which looks better than the one we received last year (it had that ugly - I believe it's Dutch - orange color :p). One of the remarkable cards the delegates find in their bags is a card titled RFID with the following text:

On the front of your Microsoft TechEd 2005 Europe wallet is an RFID device. The device contains a RANDOM NUMBER ONLY, it does not contain any personal data about you and is not linked in any way to your registration or personally identifiable information.

As part of the Microsoft TechEd 2005 Europe keynote demonstration, the RFID device is monitoring the flow of people in and out the pre-conference session rooms and the keynote session room. All monitoring will be switched off after the keynote on Tuesday 5 July 2005. (...)

Sounds nice: a big keynote coming up I guess... As the matter in fact I already have some tangible experience with RFID technology as our local library in Zottegem (the place in Belgium where I live) is one of the first libraries in our country that has secured every single book with an RFID chip. Moreover, the library visitors can register their books themselves, without requiring any assistence from the library staff.

As usual, there's a price to win by participating in this RFID stuff: 5 Creative Labs Media Centers will be distributed by choosing 5 random RFID numbers (grmbl ... I already have this device :d).

Okay, enough for this first post on the TechEd Communications Network of “Mister Big Cheese” (explanation will follow later on, after attending the *mandatory* session “How we built and New and Improved TechEd 2005 Europe IT infrastructure on Friday). For now, everything seems to work smoothly. One hour to go for my preconference “Architecture Boot Camp for Building Connected Systems”, but maybe I'll switch to another room for a couple of moments.

Off to TechEd 2005 Europe @ Amsterdam

bart — Sun, 03 Jul 2005 09:18:00 GMT

I'm packed and ready to go for TechEd 2005 Europe. Tomorrow I'll take some time to visit the center of the city and then it's time for 5 days of great sessions, some side-meetings, my ATE-work and of course the parties :p.

You'll find all my posts on TechEd 2005 Europe stuff on http://community.bartdesmet.net/blogs/bart/category/44.aspx.