Day 2 started off really well and I had one of the best night's sleep I have had in a long time, even though we had to wake up earlyish and I managed to make it down for breakfast for a change. I attended the following sessions...
- DNS 2008 Style: How Name Resolution Changes in Windows Server 2008 Infrastructures
- DNS is so pivotal to AD and Exchange and so I felt this session was important to attend, even though the changes do not seem as large as I had initially feared. Martin Coetzer took us through the management of DNS within Windows Server 2008 including use of the updated Dnscmd.exe
- Realistic Software Testing with Visual Studio Team System
- Chris Menegay took us through the automated web testing functionality built into VSTS and also through some of the gotchas and best practices for this and manual testing as well.
- Writing custom LINQ Providers
- We followed Frans Bouma's blogs while he was creating LINQ to LLBLGen Pro, but it was good to get further insight as to how some of the other providers have been developed. Bart de Smet showed us the principles followed in the development of LINQ to AD and LINQ to SharePoint.
- Best and Worst Practices Adpoting Team System
- This was another "Chalk and Talk" session with Chris Menegay, Gert Drapers and Willy-Peter Schaub. These sessions were particularly useful as we were able to provide the items to be discussed. Branching best practices and also requirements gathering were discussed.
- Implementing WCF Best Practices
- Shy Cohen and Ron Jacobs handled this session which was also a "Chalk and Talk" and there were a surprising amount of attendees who are highly proficient with the use of WCF in various applications.
- Data Protection with Cryptography of Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 and CryptoAPI: Next Generation
- We have used CAPICOM and similar in the past, but Rafal Lukawiecki provided a great session in terms of the new wrappers provided in the .NET Framework 3.5.
There was a lot of information to take on board and I was quite tired, but it was off to the Beach Party sponsored by the City of Durban after the last session. We were treated to an awesome event right on the Durban beach with live entertainment.
Day 3 was admittedly quite tough in terms of getting out of bed, but we had to pack and check out as the sessions for the day finished after 14:00. I ended up attending...
- Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Interoperability with PBX Systems
- This was quite an interesting session as we have been working with Asterisk and OCS for some time now. Nireshen Beerbul was a very impressive speaker and explained the currently supported partner PBXs and also some of the new hardware based OCS devices.
- TFS Planning is Crucial: Including Team, Solution, Source Repositories and Dependency Planning
- This was the last session at Tech-Ed which was a bit sad, but Willy-Peter Schaub made it very enjoyable and interesting by letting us in on some of the vast VSTS and TFS experience he has.
This was followed by the Closing Keynote, the highlights of which were "The Galactic Story" by Stephen Attenborough from Virgin Galactic and the announcement of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 going RTM.
All in all, I really enjoyed Tech-Ed and had the privilege of meeting some greats within the industry including Willy-Peter Schaub and Bart de Smet. The event was all about building the community and improving knowledge of current and future technologies. The days were quite busy and perhaps it could have been slightly longer, but I am already looking forward to Tech-Ed 09. It's really an event that any technical person in the Microsoft space should be looking to attend.
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