A conference cynic gets a TechEd boost

I can remember my first conference. It was wonderful! So many sessions, so much to learn, exhibitions of different new products, meeting speakers and having them sign their books … . It was an exciting time for a tech geek like myself.

So, what has changed? Well, over the years I’ve become a speaker myself. I’ve written more books, had plenty of drinks and long conversations with the other speakers, seen all the new products, and frankly, other people’s sessions tend to bore me. Maybe I went through a slump where technology itself bored me a bit too. Have you felt this way?

This past week has changed all of that. TechEd 2008 in Orlando was a whole new world in my eyes. I sat in on a session by Doug Spindler called “Why IT Pros Will Want to Deploy Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 NOW!,” which was an excellent presentation that helped to demonstrate the revisions in the Vista/Server 08 combination of network performance enhancements (i.e., Receive Window Auto-Tuning, Receive Side Scaling, Compound TCP, the use of the SMB2 protocol, and more) as well as the benefits of using IPv6. Doug exposed some of the myths surrounding IPv6 like “IPv6 is experimental,” “My network won’t run IPv6,” and “IPv6 causes Vista to run slower.” I can honestly say I left Doug’s session feeling like I had been schooled thoroughly, which is something I haven’t felt in a long time. Then I sat in on Mark Russinovich’s session called “The Case of the Unexplained,” where he examines different problems that he has encountered personally (or that have been encountered by other internals gurus like David Solomon) and shows how using the tools provided by the Sysinternals site (www.microsoft.com/sysinternals, or you can try the brand new Live Sysinternals site here) can help to show you what is causing the problem and how to fix it.

I had some personal success too that I hate to brag about, but I had my own session “Tricks of the Vista Masters” (based upon the well-known, internationally selling book Tricks of the Windows Vista Masters). The session was filled to the brim; people even had to be turned away. Did it go well? Well, I’ll let a few other journalists rave about the session. Martjin Brant from Bink.nu attended and spoke well of it, as did David Methvin from InformationWeek. It must have done well enough because they asked if I would do it again on Friday as the last session, and 30 more people showed up to see it.

Along with the session I had a blast visiting the kiosk machines Microsoft has set up for learning the latest technology. I learned some great features of Hyper-V from Dan Stolts and Mike Sterling, both from Microsoft. Dan gave me an excellent illustration that explains what happens when you turn on Hyper-V. He said it’s like lifting up your operating system and putting that Hyper-V layer underneath so that now you can add more virtual system that can be closer to the metal (or have direct access to your hardware rather than going through another OS to reach it). Stay tuned for more in Hyper-V with interviews with Dan and Mike in the future.

As for vendo, there were plenty of them. Microsoft hosts a night for exhibitors where food and wine is free for all and the booths stay open until 9 p.m. My own booth ClipTraining, along with all the others, were hopping with activity from all the people asking how the new offers worked and determining if they could use these in their business. One company we plan on discussing in a later post that caught my attention was Prowess. They had some impressive virtualization software deployment with products like SmartDeploy 2008 and VM Express.

To top the entire event off, Microsoft bought out Universal Studios for the night and we all had the pleasure of eating (the turkey legs were excellent), drinking, and playing for free.

So between the sessions, the kiosks, the vendors, and the high-energy fun, my joy in attending conferences has returned. Well, at least my joy in attending TechEd is at its peak. Next year is Los Angeles! Looking forward to it already.

And for those of you who weren’t able to attend, you might enjoy the new video site Edge.technet.com, which has a ton of great videos from the show (including some footage of yours truly and an interview coming up in the weeks ahead).