TechEd 2009: Day 4

So I was wandering around the exhibitors hall and was passing the Microsoft shop and sat outside looking decidedly bored was none other than Mark Russinovich who was patiently waiting to sign copies of his co-authored book Windows Internals 5 should anyone have decided to purchase a copy (the shop were offering a whole 25% of the list price, can’t think why there wasn’t a bigger uptake…).  Anyway I went up to him, said ‘hi’ and told him how good I thought the book was and that I wish I’d brought my copy with me was (I’d already bought mine not long after it was released).  What made me smile was that here was someone with Technical Fellow status, probably on a pretty good salary from MS, sitting there waiting to sign copies of his book.

Today has been another pretty geeky day: started off by warming up with a level 300 Group Policy/Windows 7 session, turned it up a notch with some deep-dive Windows Performance Troubleshooting & Analysis, then a level 400 Group Policy Troubleshooting session….and break for caffeine…level 400 on fixing application compatibility problems and then to wind down at the end of an intensive day…’Pushing the Limits of Windows’ presented by Mark Russinovich, again a level 400.   My brain hurts…..but I soon forgot about that as soon as they started serving food and drink the Community Drinks event.  Mmmm, beer and currywurst.

Unfortunately due to Father Ted Airlines bringing the flight time forward I’ll miss pretty much all of the last day of the conference except maybe having time for a hands-on lab first thing (although the conference does close at 14:15 so maybe it’s not that bad).  A real pity as just like the last two years I’ve been lucky enough to attend it’s been brilliant as it’s such a unique event that offers the kind of deep-dive training you just would never get attending a typical course in the UK plus you get direct access to the MS Product managers who are responsible for the products you work with day-to-day.

Downsides?  Well, we had to share the event with developers ;-)  Small price to pay I suppose…