I have attended TechDays 05, 06, 07, 08 and 2010. While i’ve always had something complain about, there was always something to gain from attending. Not this time.

When reading this, keep in mind that i’ve only attended IT Pro Sessions (with the exception of the Windows Phone 7 Developer Briefing).

There were to many things that have gone wrong.

• The keynote was boring and it didn’t even remotely have anything to do with the job of an IT Pro or a Developer. The keynote speaker also used a MacBook with OS X/Keynote.app. Seriously.
• The food was worse than what I got to eat at my Berufsschule (which wasn’t very good).
• The long lines were still there – waiting 20 minutes in line for bad food isn’t my idea of spending the day. They should’ve solved this problem by now.
• No more English talks. Why? I think we could use some experts.
• All the talks were very basic. No In-Depth stuff. Nothing to learn.
• I don’t want a basic talk about what OCS 2007 R2 can do. We’ve been using this for two years. It’s old news. Talk about Wave 14.
• Giving a basic intro on what SCVMM and Hyper-V are is not an IT Pro track – these technologies have been out since years and everyone that’s interested will already know those basics
• Make sure your stuff works. 75% of the demos did not work. Most of them because of bad internet connectivity. Yeah, i guess moving all the stuff to the “cloud” is a good idea.

The location and the whole ship theme was okay though. The evening event was also nice, and they did have good food there (different catering organization). Not sure what some danish bloke was doing there yelling “in the cloud” about 50 times. I wanted to see some chair-throwing.

Another interesting tidbit: The number of iPhones at the event. I’ve seen more iPhones than WinMo phones.

So, did you attend TechDays? What did you think about it?

Well, at least i got my picture and story published on the Microsoft Learning Website.

(Still happy, still not better than you)

If you’re in Switzerland and work with Microsoft products, attending TechDays 2008 is a generally good idea. Pricing is okay (around 500.- for normal people, 140.- for students/apprentices) and usually your boss pays for this.

TechDays 2008 will be in Basel, they’ve moved from Zurich again. I don’t know the location, but it has it’s own parking spaces, which is what the Zurich location was sadly lacking.

If you’ve never attended TechDays, here’s what you can expect:

• Many interesting speeches by people that really know their stuff
• Meet other IT professionals
• Good food
• Free NFR versions of WS2008, SQL2008 and VS2008
• See my TechDays 07 Day 1 and Day 2 writeups

If you’re going to attend, leave a comment. It’s always nice to see new faces.

I’ve attended 4 speaks:

• Remote Access & Security
• Longhorn Virtualization
• System Center Configuration Manager 2007
• System Center Operations Manager 2007

All three talks were very interesting.

Remote Access & Security

A lot about RPC over HTTPS, two factor authentication, and TS over HTTPS. It’s funny that everyone starts tunneling stuff over HTTPS now, just wondering when people start to block this, or start implementing an ALG for HTTPS.

Longhorn Virtualization

This was particularly interesting, because this guy obviously knew the underlying architecture, and explained it pretty well.

What i found rather interesting here is that Microsoft repeats the same mistakes IBM made when they started with virtualization (which IBM calls Logical Partitioning, or LPAR for short). Windows Server Virtualization uses a primary partition – even though Longhorn mitigates the risk by preferring “Longhorn Core” as the primary partition.

IBM only uses a complete Hypervisor, with no primary Partition in it’s current System i5 lineup. But the previous, Power4 generation used a primary partition, with a few obvious drawbacks.

But there are technical reasons why Microsoft can’t do this. And it’s simple: Drivers. If you’re using Longhorn Core as the primary partition, you essentially get a very, very big hypervisor ;)

System Center Configuration Manager 2007

It was pretty interesting to see how big businesses handle their desktops. SCCM is recommended for Business with more than 500 desktops, so it’s way out of league for me. There’s an alternative product for smaller businesses, called System Center Essentials, but these geared down versions usually aren’t that funny.

System Center Operations Manager 2007

I’ve had big expectations for this speak, because i’m planning to use SCOM internally. However, most of the talk covered things which are also published as Webcasts. So it was a bit of a letdown since i’ve already seen this stuff, but the talk itself wasn’t bad.

Personal Sidenote:

After leaving TechDays, and getting myself a very nice bag, i’ve lost my wallet in the parking garage. When i returned a few minutes later, it wasn’t there anymore. I’ve spent two hours cancelling all my cards, badges, etc. I even went to the police station to file a report (but that was declined, i had to wait three days). Just a few minutes ago i got a call that my wallet was found. I don’t know if i should be happy about that or not, because i’ve already wasted lots of bucks on new cards.

In general, i enjoyed this first part of the event. As always, the Kongresshaus has severe logistical problems, they don’t have enough parking space. Microsoft offered free parking at Albisgüetli, but that is about 15 minutes away.

So instead i choose to go early, and parked right next to the Kongresshaus – arrived at 08:15, and there was still plenty of parking space available. At 27.- CHF for the entire day, it didn’t come cheap, though.

Microsoft seems to have moved back from stickers to lanyards, and there were croissons available in the morning.

The Keynote was very good, held by a guy named Rafal Lukawiecki. A review on security in the past, and in the future. Very interesting, and very well done.

The next on the list was about Windows Sharepoint Services, but aimed at developers (which i didn’t really pay attention too, when choosing). Even though i’m not a developer, it was very interesting to see the architecture behind WSS.

I then attended a talk about Exchange HA & Disaster Recovery – i enjoyed this one too, but i think the title was a bit misleading, it concentrated on backups and reasons for disasters.

It was interesting to hear that he saw incorrectly configured anti virus software as the main reason for exchange full restore – i couldn’t really believe this, because it didn’t look like this guy worked with Small Businesses. He even wrote an Article about this topic on msexchange.org. While listening, i enjoyed that it seems i did everything right in the setups i did in the past, which was very reassuring.

Next was something about Windows Storage Server, or file serving from windows in general. It was very well, with a very competent speaker. It was also interesting to see that Microsoft is entering the Backup Market with DPM – at competitive prices, even though DPM requires a seperate server, which is a bit of a letdown. DFS/DFS-R was also covered very well, though there wasn’t anything there new to me.

What i wondered was that it seems that even though most people attending TechDays aren’t exacly working in SMBs didn’t know much about DFS. I assumed that most bigger companies were already using this.

At that point, i called it a day and went home. Stay tuned for the next part.