geekEleet

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend Microsoft Tech Days 2008 in Toronto and let me tell you, it was a blast.  The basic summary of the event goes something like… Microsoft tried to bridge the gap between developers and IT pros and for a last minute event, they did manage to pull it off.

The events were supposed to be more like training sessions and each lasted between and hour and an hour and a half.  Having taken sessions from both the MSDN and the TechNet streams, I can tell you that the MSDN side did a much better job at pulling it off.  Let me explain.

[more]Day 1

We arrived early on day one and found it very easy to get settled.  After we registered they gave us our name badges and what looked to be a cereal box with the name “Techie Crunch” on it.  The marketing was fantastic and it totally could have passed for a grocery store product.  Inside was a bunch of free stuff.  The pretty decent haul included:

• MS Visual Studio 2008 Professional Full Version
• MS Expression Web 2 Full Version
• MS Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite Evaluation
• Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V Evaluation
• MS Expression Studio 2 Evaluation
• Virtualization Evaluation Kit
• MS System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
• MS SilverLight
• Office Communications Server 2007 Evaluation
• MS SQL Server 2008
• 6 Month TechNet Subscription
• Tech Days Toque
• Microsoft Spen (It’s a spoon and a pen… clever eh?)

As I said - pretty decent!

After rooting through my loot, we went into the main hall for some breakfast which included bacon, eggs, sausage, fruit, juice, and some other stuff I can’t remember.  I was disappointed by the lack of opening keynote, however I did enjoy using that time to socialize and organize.  The biggest dilemma at that point was that we had these giant, heavy cereal boxes to carry around.  A backpack would have made a welcome addition to the swag collection.

I was relatively unimpressed with the day one sessions that I attended.  These were all TechNet based sessions rooted in either the infrastructure or the virtualization streams.  The first session was Failover Cluster Validation and Troubleshooting with Windows Server 2008 - the content was a little dry and the speaker was hard to hear.  I did pick up the odd tidbit and I will Google that later to get some follow up information.  The next two sessions were about Transitioning to a Virtual Environment with Microsoft Hyper-V and Managing Your Virtual Infrastructure Using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 respectively.  These two sessions were snoozers and I felt like I was watching someone else walk through a virtual lab for each of them.

They did touch on virtual server sprawl and virtual security - which made me happy.  Virtual does not mean “more secure”!  I ended day one with a demonstration from Dell about their EqualLogic SAN product which rocked my world.  Too bad I don’t have anything to do with SAN hardware procurement or provisioning, because this stuff was very cool.  I couldn’t begin to do it justice - check out their website for more info.

Day 2

Day two went a little smoother for me.  I started out by attending both of the Mastering Your Samurai Skills of Silverlight sessions.  Now this was more like it.  Going through each session we came closer and closer to the end result - which in this case was a SilverLight application that could pull movie lists from Microsoft and then play the movie for you.  The presentation was not too technical, but not lacking either.  In fact, it was damn near perfect.  Rob Burke did a masterful job at presenting SilverLight to a very large crowd, holding my attention from beginning to end.  Even the four (4) individuals who thought it a good idea to sleep and snore (loudly) through the presentation couldn’t distract me.  (Well, not too much)

Overall I was impressed with Tech Days and can’t wait for next years event.  Microsoft charged $250 a head to attend this event, so they did manage to weed out some of the clowns that were just looking for a day off work.  I personally don’t have issues with them charging for admittance.  There were no venders in my face (other than the obvious one), which made for a pleasant experience.

I grabbed the following picture from a post by Rick Claus over at the Canadian IT Pro blog.  I figured this was ok, since I am in the picture.  :)  Can you spot me?  Probably not, I’m in the background somewhere. 

That’s basically a view of the main gathering hall where everyone ate breakfast and lunch, did some in person social networking, and enjoy a keynote or two.