This years’ Tech Ed ‘99,
took place from 6th – 9th July at the RAI centre, Amsterdam. It
was my first ever Tech Ed experience and as I stepped off my plane the I felt a huge sense
of excitement of what was before me. The first task upon arriving was registration and
this was very painless. There were no queues, I simply showed my badge which had been
pre-sent to me and collected my Tech Ed ’99 rucksack.
Smart cards
In with my registration package was a smart card, and as I walked into the enormous
digital nervous centre that must have housed well over 1,000 Siemens PC’s all
connected to a huge farm of domain and web servers, I spotted each machine had a slot for
the smart card. Also, included in the package were the Windows 2,000 Beta 3 CD’s
(although only 3 days earlier I had downloaded Release Candidate 1).
After logging in and inserting the smart card it created a certificate and placed it on
the card, from now on to login all I had to do was put in the card and enter the PIN I
choose. To logoff you just remove the card. After visiting Siemens, one of the many
vendors exhibiting, I learned that the next version will do away with the PIN and will use
your fingerprint in its place. You simply enter the smart card and place your thumb on the
reader (there are obvious problems if this technology becomes common, muggers will have to
steal your cash card and chop off your thumb).
Scintillating seminars
Slides were available well in advance on the web, so I knew which sessions I wanted to
attend. Sadly wanting to go on sessions and actually being able to attend were two
different realities. Microsoft scheduled related topics such as Active Directory name
space design and replication in the same timeslot (although to their credit they did rerun
certain sessions). Many sessions were also full 15 minutes before it even started which
was also highly frustrating and I found myself wondering the halls looking for a session
that interested me in my missed timeslot. Thankfully the games centre featuring Aliens V
Predator and Mech Warrior 3 were highly educational.
Once you were in a session the story was totally different; the quality was outstanding.
Andreas Luther who was nothing short of exceptional with his internals of directory
replication seminars. I found most of the seminars lacked the real grit of the technology
but Microsoft understandably have to take a middle ground and overall I think they judged
it well, not too hard and not too easy so the serious techies weren’t bored. There
was a good range of subjects with Windows 2000 and SQL 7.0 the core technologies of the
conference and most aspects were covered well. COM was well covered and I actually got the
chance to spend four hours at the airport on the way home with one of the COM speakers
thanks to our plane being delayed.
Leisure time
The highlight of my trip was the MVP boat trip. For those who don’t know MVP’s
are the Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals and there are around 500 of us in the world
who are awarded for hard work in helping others on newsgroups and other public forums.
There were 30 MVP’s at Tech Ed and Microsoft hired a boat and took us on a trip up
the canals while eating some extremely tasty Indonesian food. The official Tech Ed party
featured the band from the film Commitments, except for the lead singer… and the
female singers but the guy who played the mad skin head tried his best as lead singer!
There was tons of food and the most incredible guys with Heinken rucksacks filling up
glasses as soon as empty, sadly our attempts to secure out own rucksack filled with beer
failed.
So finally, would I recommend Tech Ed to those who have been considering it? Definitely!
Tech Ed is worth attending as much for the opportunity to meet people and network as much
as for the sessions themselves. – John Savill
Jason Brown’s view
Certain members of the explorer team were present at this year’s Tech Ed and
with over 6,000 Microsoft techies attending, Tech Ed is with doubt, the largest gathering
of like-minded professionals in Europe. Tech Ed ’99 was made up of live speaker
theatres, a good size exhibition, the Microsoft Digital Nervous centre, Cyber Café, the
very popular games zone and the massive dining hall – big enough to feed an army!
With free food and drink in abundance the techies flocked to the 10 speaker theatres
covering topics ranging from Introduction to XML to Writing COM Add-Ins for Microsoft
Office 2000 applications.
Finding which conferences to attend was a simple affair; Microsoft kindly handed out a
well laid-out conference schedule listing conference sessions, speakers and the location
within the massive RAI centre. Choosing the correct technical level was critical as
serious techies would find "Microsoft Office 200 and the web" as interesting as
an IT director from a multi-national PLC would find "Building OLE DB Providers with
ATL" or "Advanced Use of the Microsoft Visual InterDev 6.0 Scripting Object
Model" thus Microsoft introduced a clever session ID code indicating levels of
technical ability required to fully understand the session ranging from 1 (Overview) to 4
(Seriously Technical).
At a cost of 2000 Euro’s plus hotel and airfare, Tech Ed is not cheap, however if
your company is serious about developing using the Microsoft platform, there really is no
better option to learn about the latest developments. – Jason Brown |
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