TechEd New Zealand is underway

TechEd 2007 started today starting witht the keynote speech given this year by Lou Carbone. It was brilliant! It is soon to be posted on the TechEd NZ site soon and I recommend that you watch it. It is very inspirational. Some more info on this on Darryl Burling's blog and Nigel Parker's blog

Intergen were dressed in their ususal "outstanding" outfits making our mark on the NZ community.


I went to the following events:

• DEV346 Next Generation Team Foundation Server
  Having already played with TFS quite a bit, I didn't learn a great deal from this session. However, what i did learn is that there is a way to gain access to TFS source control using a SVN client! So that means we could use TortoiseSVN from Windows Explorer to manage TFS source control - how cool!
  
• ARC304 Architecting Next Generation Business Applications
  This was heavily focussed on MOSS which wasn't for me so didn't take a lot away from this session
  
• ARC306 UX - Interface Design patterns
  This was an interesting session showing the possibilities of user interface design. It included a few video clips showing Photosynth, some multi-touch tabled demos from Jeff Han all giving us plenty of ideas for our next user interface.
  
• DAT304 The Next Release of Microsoft SQL Server: Overview
  There are a few cool additions to the next vesion of SQL Server codenamed "Katmai". I particularly liked the automatic page recovery feature of a mirrored database! Check out the rest of the features on the Microsoft site.
  The July CTP of SQL Server 2008 is now available for download

A great start to TechEd 2007. Hopefully tomorrow will continue to be as good...

Intergen setting up at TechEd 2007

Well, Tim and the rest of Tech Services did a great job of setting up the hand on labs room at TechEd this year. Well done guys!! The lab room looks cool and aparently everything is working just fine... fingers crossed!

Nothing of note has happened so far, but that's because Ben wasn't there to entertain us with a brooks-worthy cockup!! Still, 3 days left for that, eh Ben!

Shaun made a stellar effort of setting up the Intergen stand complete with an shot-em-up arcade machine. Tim and I had a game and got hooked in pretty quickly! If I'm not on lab duty or attending a session, you'll find me playing games at the Intergen stand.

As ever, the TechEd bag is quite funky and comes with a bundle of advertising inside, the most controversial of which was a brochure from Absolute IT doing a salary review. :) It's worth a read.
No free copies of Vista yet but I'm on the lookout.

To keep everything central, I've setup a Facebook group called Intergen TechEd 2007 for all the photos, videos, thoughts and new from this years event. It's an invite only group so if you're from Intergen, ping me an email and I'll add you in. There is a link to my Facebook public profile at the top of my blog and from there you can look at my groups to find the TechEd 2007 one.