TechEd 2008

Things are finally getting back to normal after TechEd. A couple more people have posted their photo collections – Craig and Willy-Peter, and I’ve finally got all of mine up as well

And so it’s all over for another year. Time to pack up, travel home and tomorrow, go back to the office. It’s been a great conference. I know there was a lot of concern about the new venue and there were a few teething problems, but overall, I think it was a very good event.

There were only two sessions this morning. I started off with a deep and very technical look at the data mining algorithms in SQL 2005. I understood some of it, but I need to brush up on my statistics.

For the second session of the day, Peter Willmot and I ran a session on basic SQL security concepts for the architects and developers. It seemed well received and it was very well attended for the last session of TechEd.

(more…)

Day two of TechEd sessions and the information deluge continues.

i ran two chalk and talk sessions today, both turned out better than i expected and I was very impressed with both the turn out and involvement of the people at the second. I’ll see if I can get related materials up later in the week.

Other sessions that I attended included a very impressive look at game development using XNA, WPF and Silverlight, with a bit of apache chucked in for good measure. The session was partially delivered by a presenter sitting in Seattle and partially by the presenter in the room. The slow internet access down in this end of the world showed, but not too much.

(more…)

So, today was the first full day of teched, and as usual, it felt like standing underneath an information waterfall. So much to see, learn and try to remember.

I started the day with Peter Willmot’s session on BI, specifically on cubes and how to present them to the users. Couple of cool sharepoint features, including reporting service web parts and the excel services. Since I committed to learning sharepoint, it’s interesting to see just how much integrates into it.

(more…)

So, TechEd South Africa started today. So far it’s been fun. As usual for the local TechEd events, the sunday was the opening keynote and a nice party. Some points that struck me during the keynote:

• Microsoft is heavily pushing the virtualisation technologies, including Hyper-V
• The application virtualisation looks fantastic for large corporations
• Silverlight 2 looks very cool
• Still no release date for SQL Server 2008

I have nothing particularly technical, just a couple pictures of the opening party.