Last Week i was invited by the kind people of microsoft to attend the Developer & IT Pro Days 2007 in Ghent - Belgium. This is a 2 day event with 2 different tracks one for dev-people and one for IT-Pro's. As an old school IT PRO this was off course the track i was most interested in.
Day - 1 - preconf
It all started with a pre-conf day about virtualisation done by Ronald Bekelaar. He delivered a good day about the stuff Microsoft will release in the future and what microsoft virtualization will bring us. I was kinda dissapointed in the depth of the content. (I always want more ;-) ) but it was a nice day and the content was interesting enough to stay awake and not run away. The way Microsoft will enter the virtualization world will be a big bang once Longhorn will be released. Until then the market will still be dominated by the competitor. (keyword here: Viridian). There will also be a nice API to plug things into (and not to mention the things that will be possible now : hot add memory, hot add processor, hot add nics, a nice clustering thing for longhorn....) Can't wait to get my hands on this technology.
Day 1
I woke up at 6, fell asleep again and was brutely awaken by my flashy PanterA mp3 ringtone due to a arranged confcall with SQLUG president Peter (he was my reminder as waking up is the hardest part of the day for me 
) and left for the venue to get the SQLUG booth ready.
I attended a sessions about Longhorn and one about IIS7 (an administrators guide). (all by David Lowe). IIS 7 will definitely be a nice platform. True xcopy deployments, possibility to host farms from CIFS shares (or even DFS). Things I allways wanted to be just there are now getting released. Deploying webfarms will become soooo much easier !
There was a very interesting side-session exclusive for SQLUG members by Bob Beauchemin about event notifications. Thx Bob for being willing to put this up for us. (the scripts can be found on www.sqlug.be)
The last session I attented was the Powershell Chalk Talk by Bruce Payette and the powershell guy (a Belgian Dutch powershell MVP !). A good session filled with nice examples of the powerfull language. I wanted to see more of the work of the the powershell guy as he absolutely rules in this area ( check the fantastic powershelled WMI explorer !)
Day 2
The second day started with an excellent session by Fred Baumhardt called DMZ'ology, Is it dead?. Except from having a great blog he also is a very good speaker. I never saw someone making a kinda difficult topic (security in general) so easy to follow. The session was excellent and the lessons learned is that a DMZ serves almost nothing and IPsec is the way you want to secure your perimeters. And use an application firewall like ISA ;-). Something I knew allready but due to it all being kinda difficult to setup for novice admins I never deployed to customers. I will take the time to convince them moving in this area as it has lots of advantages. Him saying you don't need a DMZ after all I kinda disagree on that. What about other OS's and systems that are not IPsec aware, anyway good food for more discussions !
Next session was about Terminal Services in Longhorn by our local man Arlindo: A good overview but hey nothing beats CITRIX ;-). Microsoft improved some things but if you want real Server Based Computing you go third party.
A good session was also delivered about the Intelligent Apllication Gateway (aka Whale tech, aka acquired by Microsoft some time ago). this is a solution that offers granular information protection (mostly know by the name SSL-VPN). For the sharepoint community this is technology you'll want to invest time and effort into as this offers so much more then ISA and other security appliances. (And since it was acquired by MS license fees dropped 
)
Concluding this day was the fun Closing keynote by Chad "Kudzu" about usability of software and more. A good laugh and lots of "aha erlebnis" ;-)
Other Stuff
- Except from attending sessions i also helped running the SQLug booth and talked to a lot of interesting people and friends about all things we are all passionate about and the stuff we work with on a daily basis.
- By the way enjoy Arlindo[MSFT] trying to speak french and being very proud of his work for the belgian community in this video shoot. And he has the right to be very proud! The belgian IT community was never more alive then at this moment and this is just the beginning. SQLUG just started one year ago and now has more then 270 enthousiasts. Proexchange more then 400, and a new usergroup called winsec joins the growing gang of usergroups (ITTalks, BIWUG, VISUG, and many others...)
- I had great fun spending some time with Jake Zborowski and Ashvini Sharma from the SQL product teams. Talking with people so passionate about the stuff they work on makes you also some more passionate about the products.
It was a good week.... on to the real life again...
kind regards
//Bart
