Whew! TechED 2006 is finally over, but I’m not as bushed as I have been in past years. For those of you that haven’t been to TechED in the past, it is quite an experience. Nearly 12,000 geeks all in once place with a ton of Microsoft and partner booths all over the place. There were literally several hundred 1.25 hour sessions throughout the week on every topic imaginable from development, deployment, security, infrastructure, collaboration, storage, best practices, troubleshooting, Vista, Longhorn, messaging, etc. No to mention more informal chalk talks and lots of vendor interactions.
What I really like is the Technical Learning centers (which go by various names in different years), where there are dozens and dozens mini-booths for all kinds of MS products such as Vista, SQL, SMS, MOM, Office, Groove, LCS, Visual Studio, IE 7, security, etc. They are manned by MS experts (for the most part) so you can ask questions, give feedback, see demos, and pickup fliers on lots of topics. I had some good talks with the BitLocker, IE7, SMS, MOM, security, Vista, and other guys there. It’s neat to feel like they really do listen to customers, and get the inside ‘dirt’.
For example, I talked to the IE7 guy and asked him why you couldn’t rearrange the tabs in IE. He acknowledges that was a highly requested feature and said that the code was basically already written. However, due to their intense testing and all the cases that need to be tested, the feature had to be cut. Yes they could throw it in, but the quality might not be great. Over and over in the sessions they stressed quality and testing. Many features got dropped from products even though the code was complete, but they couldn’t do all the required testing in time. Update: IE 7 beta 3 has the tab rearrangement feature.
Another perfect example is Bitlocker. Right now in Vista you can only encrypt a single partition, the OS partition. I asked the Bitlocker guy why they couldn’t do more partitions. He said the test matrix for all the various combinations of internal storage, external storage, USB, RAID, etc. just made it impossible to support for Vista. However for Longhorn server they will do all of that testing. I told the guy if they could at least support the physical boot drive and all partitions on it that would go a long way. He acknowledge that, and said the policy might change before Vista RTMs. According to their research over 80% of laptops just have a single partition, but he knows as drives get larger and larger people do partition. The demo they had of Bitlocker encryption was way cool and actually showed the low-level bit patterns on the HD platters and a real-time statistical analysis showing the randomness of the encrypted data. It had a neat 3D view of the platters, kind of like a full color scanning electron microscope view.
In a few weeks I will be getting a DVD that has all of the slides, audio and video of every session. I know there are many sessions I couldn’t see due to overlapping times, so there are some I want to hear. If anyone has a specific technology area of interest, I can pull down just the slides from the TechED web site. I will be sure to make a copy of the DVD and bring it in so anyone else can get the benefit of the great sessions.
