Lovely wheather in Amsterdam on our second day at Microsoft TechEd 2012.
Unfortunately I missed the second keynote (will have to catch that on video later).
Since I really like IPv6 I chose Edward Horley’s talk WCL324: IPv6 Bootcamp: Get Up to Speed Quickly as my first item of business. Ed, whom I have not seen before, delivered a great talk and had some very good advice on IPv6 deployments. I fully agree with his recommendation of disabling the IPv6 transition technologies, but leaving IPv6 itself enabled. You will have much more predictable network behavior then.
Next up I got a chance to meet an old hero of mine; Dr. Tom Schinder. Tom was/is the leading expert on ISA Server/TMG products. I have read his book on ISA 2000 and probably all of his blog posts on the subject. Tom has lately begun spending more time as an architect and gave a very interesting session on the foundations of cloud computing; AAP304: Private Cloud, Principles, Concepts and Patterns. The session basically explained why the System Center suite does what it does. I got to shake the good man’s hand later and have a quick chat. Unfortunately I didn’t have a change to get a picture with him. The camera on my HTC HD7 is just too poor.
In my first session after lunch, SIA200: Cyber Security Defenses: What Works Today, I also got a change to meet another speaker that I have heard a lot about; Robert Grimes. Robert wrote the Protect You Windows Network book together with Jesper Johansson. This is a great book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in security. Rober, and his co-presenter Mark Simos, gave us a fantastic 75 minutes of security information. Loved this session!
The day’s last session was Andy Malone’s SIA400 The Cryptography Chronicles: Explaining the Unexplained, Part 1. This is one of the very few level 400 sessions on TechEd and it was great. I am really fascinated by cryptography and Andy gave a really good introduction. He also had a little competition for the audience with a Caesar substitution cipher (which I was able to solve!). Unfortunately it had some mistakes so the plaintext read WE ARE AKK GEEGS, instead of the intended WE ARE ALL GEEKS. I talked to Andy later and he admitted that it had been pretty late when he put that one together. Part 2 will be on Friday.
We finished the day with a nice cruise on the Amsterdam canals.