Tech∙Ed EMEA 2008 IT Pro Day 4 Recap

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Dave and I are your DirTeam bloggers on Microsoft’s Tech∙Ed Europe Middle East & Africa (EMEA) conference for IT Professionals in Barcelona (Spain) from November 3rd, 2008 to November 7th, 2008.

So you’re still with us? Let’s take a look at Thursday, day 4 of the conference. Highlights: Speaker Idol, Mark Russinovich, great cigars and some great Dutch community ideas.

 

Sessions

Today's sessions were Anatomy of a Hack (by Jesper Johansen) and Inside Windows Server 2008 R2 Virtualization Improvements and Native VHD Support (by Mark Russinovich). Both sessions were delivered in the Auditorium.

Jesper Johansson showed an deep look into Antivirus XP 2008. You might already be familiar with this specific piece of malware when you’re subscribed to Donna's SecurityFlash. It’s a nasty piece of software, that does a really good job at tricking users into installing it, running it and paying for it. I’ll never look the same at the (Windows) Security Center again.

I attended the session by Mark Russinovich together with Marc van Orsouw. This was a level 400 session on Hyper-V improvements in Windows Server 2008 R2, including live VM migration, hypervisor power management support and new hardware-assisted guest memory management. Windows 7 booting from VHD was a nice feature that was shown, by looking at the way Mark’s currently booted Operating system was actually started from a VHD.

 

Speaker Idol

Today also featured the finale of Tech∙Ed Speaker Idol. The finale featured four contestants, who all provided an entertaining and compelling five-minute presentation: Rhonda Layfield, Maral Topolian, Alex de Jong and Dimitri Sotnikov.

I found the four sessions were all exceptionally good quality. In the end Alex placed fourth, because of the presence of profanity in his presentation (sh*t happens when you present on something you’re passionate about), Maral and Dimitri placed second (which is the second time Maral ended in second place on Speaker Idol) and Rhonda went home to the USA with the first prize and a ticket to next year’s TechEd EMEA IT Pro. I guess we’ll see Rhonda on stage and between the Speaker Idol judges next year!

 

International Community Party

Dave and I both attended the International Community Party at the Elephant Club, located on the other side of Barcelona. We used public transportation to reach the location and ended up travelling for a long period of time… again. (Some might think we learned our lesson on Day 0)

The party itself was good fun while it lasted. The organization behind the Springboard Series was busy giving away SWAG (Stuff We All Get), handing out (Cuban) cigars, walking around with plates full of tapas. The place was filled with MCTs, MVPs, Microsoft employees, TechNet Plus subscribers and Springboard Invitees. Dave and I sat with Gerard Verbrugge for a while while we both smoked away a nice Cohiba cigar. We also spoke to some other Dutch people there, like Martijn Bellaard, who has some great ideas on sharing information with the Dutch IT Pro Community. Marco Timmermans is also walking around with some great ideas, so I guess I need to give him a call as well!

Dave left to take the metro back to the hotel, but I decided to stay around and see what’d happen. I couldn’t have imagined what actually happened. At midnight the location invited in it’s normal guests. The locals getting in were actually dressed in tuxedos and fancy dresses. It was a big difference with the party invitees. We were dressed in T-shirts, jeans and clothes like that and we could actually dance. (Well, some of us can) The result was most of the party invitees left the club. I ran into Daniel and Tony again and we decided to go to Shôko again. We were joined by Karen Young and two other MVPs and had good fun. Daniel even participated in a dance-off with some professional break dancers!

 

Concluding

At 3:00 am I left the club to take a cab to the hotel, where I crashed into the hotel bed.
Five days of conference and every night in between I went clubbin’ 🙂

Tip!
If you’re planning on attending Tech∙Ed next year: 12 hours of sleep should be enough to keep on going.

Tech-Ed IT Pro 2008 : It’s Partytime! Dutch
TechEd – dag 4 Dutch
Speaker Idol Final  Dutch
TechEd IT Professionals – Day 4 Interviewing Mark Minasi and Mark Russinovich

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