|
|
29 June 2004
|
|
| |
I thought I had it then. The wireless indicator lit up, I did an IPConfig and found a valid address, and even managed to load up Google. I fired up RadioFM quicksmart to upload my blogs entries and BOOM instant offline once again. SOMEONE SORT THIS CRAP OUT PLEASE!
For god's sake. Having a network area with 1500 cables strewn all over the floor would be infinitely preferable to the really annoying, flakiness crappyness that is the current wireless network infrastructure.
Sheesh.
Ethernet adapter Wireless Network Connection:
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 0.0.0.0
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 0.0.0.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :
C:Documents and Settingspete>
:( :( :(
OOOOO - I've heard rumours that there are wire connection points around here somewhere. I'm off to hunt them down.
4:16:30 PM 
|
|
The usual TechEd network curse has struck again. No matter how hard Microsoft stress that this year's network will be better than ever, it always seems to crash out and not function at all. This is one such year. Just like last year I can't connect to the network, can't do my email, can't download any of the cool toys I'm hearing about in all the sessions, and more to the point can't access the TechEd site to post valuable feedback on my personal user experience with the event network. I can't upload my blog posts either so I guess I'm stuck with cacheing them all up and uploading them whenever the network load appears to ease off. When I tried doing that this morning though the network connection went down halfway through the upload and I had all sorts of nasty broken link problems to fix with the images I also uploaded. Not cool. Not cool at all.
4:16:20 PM
|
|
Jason Bock and I have been shooting the breeze by email lately about doing some kind of XBox Live event. To quote him
I've been talking to Peter via e-mail, and we're going to try and have a XBoxLive gaming event. There's no real structure to it right now, but to compensate for the approximately 6 hour difference between England and the US, we're going to start at 12 PM CST. We'll probably have some PGR2 and Links in there, along with RS2 - pretty much any game that everyone has and can allow for a large number of people in the rooms. Other gamers are encouraged to attend ;). Spread the word!
So there you have it. My XBox Live gamertag is Froogle, and I'll definately be on for a few games of anything we can find.
Like Jason said, spread the word.
4:16:14 PM
|
|
I thought I had it then. The wireless indicator lit up, I did an IPConfig and found a valid address, and even managed to load up Google. I fired up RadioFM quicksmart to upload my blogs entries and BOOM instant offline once again. SOMEONE SORT THIS CRAP OUT PLEASE!
For god's sake. Having a network area with 1500 cables strewn all over the floor would be infinitely preferable to the really annoying, flakiness crappyness that is the current wireless network infrastructure.
Sheesh.
Ethernet adapter Wireless Network Connection:
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 0.0.0.0
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 0.0.0.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :
C:Documents and Settingspete>
:( :( :(
OOOOO - I've heard rumours that there are wire connection points around here somewhere. I'm off to hunt them down.
3:54:05 PM
|
|
The usual TechEd network curse has struck again. No matter how hard Microsoft stress that this year's network will be better than ever, it always seems to crash out and not function at all. This is one such year. Just like last year I can't connect to the network, can't do my email, can't download any of the cool toys I'm hearing about in all the sessions, and more to the point can't access the TechEd site to post valuable feedback on my personal user experience with the event network. I can't upload my blog posts either so I guess I'm stuck with cacheing them all up and uploading them whenever the network load appears to ease off. When I tried doing that this morning though the network connection went down halfway through the upload and I had all sorts of nasty broken link problems to fix with the images I also uploaded. Not cool. Not cool at all.
3:54:01 PM
|
|
Jason Bock and I have been shooting the breeze by email lately about doing some kind of XBox Live event. To quote him
I've been talking to Peter via e-mail, and we're going to try and have a XBoxLive gaming event. There's no real structure to it right now, but to compensate for the approximately 6 hour difference between England and the US, we're going to start at 12 PM CST. We'll probably have some PGR2 and Links in there, along with RS2 - pretty much any game that everyone has and can allow for a large number of people in the rooms. Other gamers are encouraged to attend ;). Spread the word!
So there you have it. My XBox Live gamertag is Froogle, and I'll definately be on for a few games of anything we can find.
Like Jason said, spread the word.
3:53:54 PM
|
|
The usual TechEd network curse has struck again. No matter how hard Microsoft stress that this year's network will be better than ever, it always seems to crash out and not function at all. This is one such year. Just like last year I can't connect to the network, can't do my email, can't download any of the cool toys I'm hearing about in all the sessions, and more to the point can't access the TechEd site to post valuable feedback on my personal user experience with the event network. I can't upload my blog posts either so I guess I'm stuck with cacheing them all up and uploading them whenever the network load appears to ease off. When I tried doing that this morning though the network connection went down halfway through the upload and I had all sorts of nasty broken link problems to fix with the images I also uploaded. Not cool. Not cool at all.
2:12:39 PM
|
|
The keynote at TechEd Amsterdam this morning was an absolute blinder with Microsoft announcing and releasing (in beta form mostly) 6 new products. Called the Express range, these are basically each area of functionality in Visual Studio 2005 broken out into individual products to enable people to get up to speed learning new technologies. They are aimed specifically at hobbyists, enthusiasts and students (professional and self led).
The products are Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition, Visual C# 2005 Express Edition, Visual J# 2005 Express Edition, Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition , Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition and SQl Server 2005 Express Edition.
I went to Scott Guthries session this morning and got a demo of Visual Web Developer and SQL Server 2005 Express, and they absolutely rock. On the web side, Visual Web developer is really the natural evolution of Web Matrix. It has it's own built in web server, doesn't require admin rights to run, supports Intellisense everywhere (code, html etc), 100% HTML preservation and full integration with SQL Server 2005 Express. THe latter is a replacement for Microsoft's MSDE system. It is really Yukon in slimmed down form, storing all it's data in files which is a great story and makes for seamless xcopy deployment of database schema, and data along with the application. Visual Web Developer as with all the other express products has full database integration, and that should be great news for the VB Standard edition guys out there that had a lot of problem with Microsoft's decision to strip out the Server explorer from that product.
All the products are available for download in Beta form right now, presumably from MSDN. I'll post back when I get an accurate URL.
12:04:04 PM
|
|
We were told (John and I ) to go "cheap" with the hotel booking. I left it all in John's capable hands and I'm glad I did. He found a great hotel, not too far from the convention center, with fantastic large rooms, and in my case a great view. This is the view from my bedroom window for the week.
The weather's great, the birds are singing, and there's little to no noise from the hustle and bustle of city traffic. I love it. I think I'm going to have some fantastic late night code hacking sessions in here - it's all wonderfully inspiring.
PS I love the way the mouse dwarf's my Acer Tablet in that picture. The Acer is sooo tiny.
10:24:15 AM
|
|
I strongly recommend the faint of heart to avoid channel surfing in a dutch hotel room! Blimey guv'nor!
10:23:53 AM
|
|
I always get a kick out of opening the TechEd freebie bag when I get back to the hotel (even when the bag is a retina burning fluorescent orange).
This year was as good as ever as far as goodies go. We got (in no particular order)
- The usual bumper crop of marketing crap from various partners
- A pretty cool white TechEd T-Shirt
- O'Reilly's Compact .NET Framework Pocket Reference
- Windows XP Service Pack 2, release candidate
- Visual Studio.NET Pro (trial)
- SQL Server 2000 Enterprise (trial)
- Microsoft's Security Guidance Kit
- The March 2004 burn of the Patterns & Practices CD (very very cool)
- Visio 2003 SDK
- ISA Server4 2004 (trial)
- Microsoft Pocket Streets (full copy and very appropriate)
- Office 2003 SDK
- Windows Mobile Developer Resource Kit
- Visio 2003 (trial)
- A cool pen that lights up
- A windows 2003 Server notebook ( the paper kind)
- A document about MVP's and how to nominate them (nominate me, nominate me)
- Free copy of the latest MSDN magazine ( very cool)
- Free copy of Reach
- Handy pen-case thing
And a whole bunch of other stuff (my bed now looks like a Microsoft Marketeers wackiest fantasy).
I know it sounds like a bit of a let down getting so much trial software but it really isn't. I've brought with me Virtual PC images for clean and developer ready installs of Windows Server 2003 and Longhorn and I'm dying to install the trial stuff now to try it out on those images. With Virtual PC there's nothing stopping me preserving the original virtual machine image and re-installing the software when the trial period runs out if I want to keep exploring. Fantastic stuff. I love TechEd - "If you have the means, I highly recommend you get one"
10:23:26 AM
|
|
I said in an earlier post that one of the things that I love about going to events like TechEd is meeting up with old friends. I get to see other authors I know and sit down and have a good old whinge about how bad Wrox was (before Wiley bought the brand of course - I'm sure Wrox stands for nothing but quality these days, please dont sue me ;) ), marvel over technology and of course down the odd free beverage. I also get to see people I had forgotten I knew from way back in my independent days or from previous jobs.
It took about ten minutes this year after checking into the event for that very thing to happen, and to drive home both how small the world is these days, and how great Microsoft conferences are. In 2002 I worked at Credit Suisse in Zurich on an Accenture project staffed with Avalaugh consultants (don't ask). Seconded there for 5 months I made some great friends from other European offices of Avalaugh and from Credit Suisse . One in particular was a young lady called Terri. Now, Terri is an American who had moved to Zurich to live permanently and work for Credit Suisse. She's great fun, really knows her stuff technically and can drink any man I know under the table. It was quite a shock to bump into her after not even thinking about her for the past two years. We shot the breeze a little and promised to hook up later in the week for her to prove to me once again that all men are wimps and that women are the master race, especially when it comes to alcohol consumption. What a small world though. I'd just got off a plane from England, and within minutes of arriving in Amsterdam had met an American I know who lives in Switzerland. Freaky.
If there's anyone else out there reading this that knows me, or knows of me, and wants to say Hi then for gods sake look me up on the TechEd peer networking site and send me a ping. My practice at Edenbrook is also hiring at the moment, so you never you know what might happen ;)
10:22:59 AM
|
|
I don't know quite why, but for some reason I got up at 6:30am to catch the noon flight to Amsterdam. The airport is only 45 minutes away from my house, so I guess my inner child must have been screaming at me from the wee small hours to get up since Christmas had arrived early.
I know that Barcelona has been home to TechEd for the last few years but I couldn't for the life of me understand why Microsoft chose to move the European Tech Ed back to Amsterdam. Then, when we landed, I found out why. First up, Holland's a wonderfully civilised country (discounting the excessive proliferation of legal drugs, pornography, street prostitution and rampant street crime in the big cities, like Amsterdam, of course). The first thing to great you when stepping off the plane in fact is information signs in English. I was dreading picking up a Dutch phrase book and sounding like a Klingon with a serious phlegm problem all week.
I particularly liked the sign for Passport control which as far as I can tell clearly shows an immigration official accepting a small gift by way of a bribe. What a fantastically liberated country this is ;) In fact, my first thought was that this was a pictorial explaining the country's liberated drug policy. For example, the top picture clearly shows a suitcase sitting on a row of pills. The second picture shows that if caught with the above, you'll be hung, unless (third picture) you come up with a suitable way of pleasing the official in charge. (I'm joking of course - badly - I'm very tired).
Anyway, the other neat thing about Amsterdam as a location is that it's quite a technology aware place. I mean even the advertising boards seem to have context sensitive error highlighting built in.
As you can clearly see here we have an error on the word Plaza and on the '>' sign following the =. Clearly '>' needs to precede the '=' sign and Plaza is an unknown type.
Those people that have been to a TechEd before know that the most pressing concern when you touch down in the host country is "What revolting colours have Microsoft chosen for our bags and t-shirts this year?". The sight of few beautiful blonde hostesses wearing quite fetching red TechEd T-Shirts and Caps got rid of those worries, for a while a least, as we were ushered out to the coach for the short trip to the conference center. The fears soon came flooding back though as we stepped off the coach to see hoardes of newly checked in people wandering around with the most revolting Orange Bags you have ever seen. Last years Red back pack kind of grew on you, while 2002's aqua roller bag had certain ease of use qualities that more than made up for the appalling colour choice. This year though MS have outdone themselves by choosing to give us all bags that not only look hideous, but which are also almost completely unusuable.
The nasty shoulder bag thing has no less than 5 straps on in and comes with a user guide (I'm serious) that shows you how to set it up to actually carry stuff. Now, I don't know about you, but the prospect of losing all feeling in my shoulder by heaving this monstrosity around, added to the fact that it's made out of the kind of hi-visibility material you see roadside workers wearing completely put me off this thing from the moment I held it. I'm back in the hotel now, and the bag has been emptied of all it's goodies (more on those later) and the luggage tag has been removed and added to my trusty Samsonite backpack. When are Microsoft going to get a clue about these things. Make it look good, with a nice colour scheme, your logo plastered all over it for a high poseur factor, and backpack straps to spread the load. At least the white t-shirt we got though is actually suprisingly nice this year. I may even wear mine this week.
PS. In the nasty shot of the convention center above you can just make out the mass of bicycles parked up. Alas these are not for our use, but John did point out that that would have been quite a fun thing; thousands of people on bright orange tech-ed bikes making their way to and from the convention center everyday through the busy streets of Amsterdam. I'm sure the locals would love that ;)
10:22:18 AM
|
|
|
|
© Copyright
2004
Pete Wright.
Last update:
27/11/2004; 12:29:02.
This theme is based on the SoundWaves
(blue) Manila theme. |
|
|
