TechEd 2012 (#Tee12), Amsterdam —- Day 1

I will blog a bit about the sessions and stuff I saw at TechEd in Amsterdam – all from the perspective of a SharePoint guy.

Keynote (Brad Anderson)

Its all about cloud and virtualization. Broad coverage of all the new stuff, quite like the new Visual Studio features (List definition builder integrated, wondering how it will work with taxonomy fields)

First session: What’s new in Windows Azure (Scott Guthrie)

Provisioning of Azure virtual machines with a new and lean HTML5 web interface – metro styled of course. I think we will see this stlye in SharePoint ‘15.

Hosting virtual machines is quite new, you can even host Linux VMs on Azure. If those VMs would not be so expensive I would migrate my DEV/DEMO environment to Azure – but that’s another story.

The source control publishing feature is also very cool  - I really wanna see this “in the wild” – I use git in a some of my SharePoint projects…

“Focus on apps, not infrastructure”

Second session: Continuous Feedback in Agile Teams (Ed Glas, Sebastian Holst)

Smart session about the new tooling in Team Foundation Server 2012. Actually this could be the first Microsoft source control I wanna use – at Alegri we are using TFS2010 but I dont have the feeling that it speeds up my work or helps me and the team working better together. TFS2012 may change this – you can try the new one on tfspreview.com

Third session: 36 Terabytes: How Microsoft IT Manages SharePoint in the Enterprise

Quite entertaining talk for that subject – I learnt that if a meteor hits the datacenter its called a disaster – and what you could do in such a situation. Additionally they showed two tools SPPivot (sppivot.codeplex.com) for showing PowerPivots in SharePoint and one for testing SharePoint configuration with powershell (mini-audits for configuration changes) – I will try and review them at www.sharepointtoolbox.com.

Fourth session: Windows Server 2012 Overview (Michael Leworthy)

Wow, amazing cool new stuff. Really too much to list them here, but I am really looking forward to test the new hyper-v when I update my whole DEV/DEMO environment to the new wave (with the SharePoint beta available).

I will definitive try to automate all tasks with powershell and remove the GUI for a while – lets see how that goes.

Fifth session: Monitoring and Operating a Private Cloud with System Center 2012

I skipped the session and took the first cloud exam for free. Great experience, got 323 points (700 needed) without looking at a book or seeing the product. And failed.