Day 1 was great! I mean absolutely great, but it was tiring as well. My tiredness got even bigger, because of the traffic jam we were stuck in for more than 40 minutes in our way back home. Having told this, imagine how mad the girl I called for a coffee was at me, when I kept her waiting for, as she said, almost 30 minutes!(Miss Grigorova, if you’re reading this and I’m sure you are, you know how sorry I am! Will you watch The Smurfs with me? Please…). Anyway, after a 6-hour sleep, day 2 didn’t started that good. After the first session I was feeling as my brain was still not functioning the right way. Hopefully, I got better, when a colleague of mine(who had a very lucky day that day – Ivellin Mollov(twitter|blog) told me that he is in the same situation. It’s always great to hear that “you are not alone”, isn’t it? So…

Start of the day with Andy Malone

The first session I attended was, of course, Andy’s. This was the first of his two parts on cryptography and it was a lot more theoretical than demo-oriented. Thank God, Mr. Malone is not only a great presentator, but a man with an extreme sense of humor (the story about the Russian guy making him drink vodka and the Russian accent he used to tell it, simply burst the audience’s sides with laughter)! He remembered us that encryption is only a tool and that cryptography’s major function is to enforce TRUST, but that’s all! He discussed different ways of encryption and even gave us a little homework – to decrypt this text – “unou yzgzk” using the substitution cipher method. We saw a demo of how to hide text in a jpeg file, but the demos were still to come in the second part of the session.

Continuing with clouds

Karl Davies – Barrett who is a Developer Platform Evangelist at Microsoft (twitter) made a very, very demo-intensive session! He successfully completed 4 absolutely independent demos on Windows Azure and it’s unreleased (for now) features on a not that good internet connection. We saw demos on Federated Authentication, SQL Azure Data Sync, Azure Connect and AppFabric Service Bus and because a colleague of mine asked me on the next day how are Microsoft going in their cloud “things” and I told him that they have the best cloud platform on the market, I will repeat it for you too, just to be sure you know it – Microsoft has the best cloud platform in the IT industry right now. Period!

Two sessions instead of one

For my third session, I really wanted to hear what’s the new Dynamic Memory feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 all about, but there was a session, starting 15 minutes later, which I really preffered much more. So, I went to hear the first 15 minutes of the Dynamic Memory session and then right to the session called “High Achievers in IT”. The first 15 minutes in the Windows Server session were about the not that infamous Balloon Driver used in the VMs and the differences between how the Hyper-V and VMWare technology work with the memory. Haven’t heard anything about the Dynamic Memory itself, I went for the Valcho Stoyanov’s presentation. This was one of the best presentations in the whole conference. I swear it was! What he very emotionally talked about was the fact that many of the IT employees today are there not because of the passion for technologies, but just to get their salaries and that’s all about it. He shared his opinion that this will not be that way for long, because our industry is so dynamic, so fast changing, that if you’re not passionate about the new technologies, there are some folks out there, who are! And now, we have a problem, aren’t we? (by the way, have you thought what cloud will bring with itself and what will be changed? No? It’s time for you to do that) Valcho said that managers need to search for great people and not necessarily for great skills. Why? Because what you are as a character cannot be changed, but what you know about a specific technology could be! I wrote down a great quote connected to the previous sentence – “Get the right people on the bus and then decide where to go!”. He talked about how important for the IT guys is to work in a disciplined manner, know the processes, which need to be followed and so on. After the session, I thought that I don’t know anything about the ITIL framework(which he recommended us to study carefully) and I need to do something about it. And I will! However, Valcho Stoyanov is the proper leader! I really thought after his session that I want to be working with him some day, because we definitely share the same values and way of thinking! Now I remember how angry I got when he told us that there are still people in the IT industry who say something like this: “I don’t have any work, so I am sitting here, doing nothing…”. And this guy works in the IT industry? WOW? Impressive! That’s what I say for people like that! (I’m starting getting angry again so will end up here!).

Mr. Malone. Part 2

Back for the second session about cryptography and security, Andy Malone started with the well-know phrase: “There’s no such thing as security!”. Not only he said that, he proved it to us! Less than 2 minutes were needed to extract the code for a HDD encrypted with BitLocker and get access to what was there on the had drive(we’re talking about a PC without a TPM module!). We saw a demo on TrueCrypt too and how we can hide a file into another file. That’s, of course, just a simple scenario. Andy told us that you can hide a file into a file, who hides a VM, in which is hidden a different type of image and so on. Can you imagine that? DAMN, I STILL CANNOT! He talked about the future trends in security and really emphasized on the Quantum encryption encouraging us to spent some time reading about it. Unfortunately, this was Mr. Malone’s last session for this conference, but he will be leading a security conference in London some time soon, where some very deep security will be discussed, so if there’s someone of you interested seriously in this area/subject, I cannot think of something else, but to recommend you go there! This guy is amazing and you definitely need to hear him talking! Believe me!

The famous SQL Server Unplugged session!

Magi is famous with this session! From some years, she challenges the audience to ask her questions to which she have to find an answer, otherwise you will receive a present. I don’t know for the previous years, but this year Magi and the audiences took turns. I can’t explain exactly how much fun the session was, but the Master is a Master. In one time, she went so deep in SQL Server, that she showed us how to read the transaction log inside the Management studio. Guess what? This is possible, but in order to do that, you have to use an UNDOCUMENTED function in SQL Server! In the first moment I said to myself – ARE YOU SERIOUS? UNDOCUMENTED FUNCTION IN SQL SERVER? WHAT THE ….? But it’s … true! It works and you can really read the transaction log and see what’s there in it! Still can’t work this out… However, even I won a little prize from her(25% discount from one of her courses in the academy), because of my hesitant response to one of her questions(you bet I wrote that down!). At the end of the session, which was the last session for the conference, quite an interesting discussion was about to happen, but it didn’t. The topic was MS SQL Server vs Oracle Database. Damn, I’m scared to hear Magi comparing these two…

Beautiful end and a brief summary

My first Microsoft Days passed fantastic! I really had a lot of fun, learned so much new things and made some great new contacts. There was only one thing missing – to win something from the raffle, which took place after the last session. I will not keep you in suspense, but I didn’t win anything! Now, do I have to be sad about it? Probably. There were some great prizes, including 2 Windows Phone 7 smartphones, some hardware and… don’t know what else! The truth is, however, that as every single time, I don’t care! (you guys who know me, know what I mean). So, in summary, I need to say it again – Microsoft Days 2011 was a great experience for me and I’m already looking forward for the next year! For all of you who are still hesitating whether you have to attend this conference or not, I recommend you spent some money and do go there! It’s really worth it!

End.

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