Microsoft TechDay Madrid 2012

Last November 22nd, the star technical event of Microsoft, TechDay 2012, was held in Madrid, to which he was invited XatakaWindows as an assistant, and of which I bring a summary of a long and intense day with many conversations in the corridors and an atmosphere of euphoric perspectives.

A bright future for developers and IT

Certainly in this type of event the biggest drawback is not being able to be ubiquitous and be at the same time in the three tracks that ran in parallel, plus the eminently practical laboratories.Certainly the presentations at these events, as a speaker explained to us, cannot get too far into the technological guts because they would leave out a large part of the attendees, for which reason the hallway conversations gained interest and consumed a large part of the event.

In addition, the celebration of Community Day after TechDay meant that the professionals recognized by Microsoft as MVPs were gathered at the venue , the cream of today's computer technology and with an extraordinarily high level of knowledge.

Of all the presentations I would like to highlight the ones that have most caught my attention, either because of what they were showing me, because they were especially inspiring or because of the lines of study that they have opened up for me.

An inspiring presentation

When José Bonnin started his presentation, with a movie screen behind him, he told us that what we were going to see projected were not PowerPoint slides, but a presentation HTML5 + JS on an IE10 full screen And as his “speech” went by, all of us who are dedicated to making Web pages professionally looked in amazement at the visual effects, the perfect integration of audio, images and video to constitute a multimedia show that accompanied the speaker's words.

The number of developers in Spain is about 118,000 professionals, of which a few out of every hundred have a special vocation for learning , to share and to be up to date with technology: the supergeeks. Curious word with positive connotations, and which closely describes the almost 700 people who have attended TechDay.

According to Bonnin, it could be said that there have been 6 important milestones in the current Information Society that have marked a profound change, a computer revolution:The microprocessor The hardware start of the computer revolution.IBM PC, took computers out of labs and made consumer computing more accessible to the general public.The birth of Microsoft, the company that built the software on which today's Information Society is based.Windows95, the OS that got a computer in every house, a Windows on every computer.The arrival of the Internet to the civil and world sphere. The universal democratization of access to knowledge and information.The birth and acceptance of the Smartphone by the general public. The ubiquity of access to digital civilization.

Thus, now there is a fundamental change in the industry, now uniformity is sought in all devices. To have a unique experience that does not depend so much on the hardware, but instead has laid the foundations for a revolution in the PC, a new era, a new vision of the PC, and not so much as a desktop device , otherwise personal computing

Following the semblance of these new times with new forms of iteration with hardware and software, the speaker referred to Kinect, a surprise that was launched almost as a gesture joystick for the Xbox and that was it has become a device for "serious" applications such as medical, research or tourism; and with a future impossible to foresee by its developers.

In summary it was a very inspiring presentation, which has left us feeling that we are being privileged agents of change and that, possibly, professionals in Microsoft technologies have some very interesting prospects for the future.

Systems Administration 2012

Although, as I indicated before, the technical talks must be kept at a level of depth and detail that allows most of those present to follow the thread of what is being shown, the truth is two have particularly attracted attention.Both for the speakers who have been able to maintain the interest of the listeners in the face of technical information, which can become very dense and boring, and for the things they taught and which require much more in-depth study.

Fernando Guillot, David Cervigon and Miguel Hernandez gave an excellent talk about what's new in Windows 2012 Server and System Center 2012, maintaining a Rhythm and freshness in the talk, together with a sense of humor that made all those present laugh with jokes and jokes from and for IT's.

Among the things that have caught my attention the most I would like to refer to:Powershell, the command line system and scripting of Windows is being used massively, now, by administrators. And in the 2012 version it has powerful novelties such as the Command screen, where PowerShell scripts can be built visually, the arrival of Intellisense to script writing, the automatic generation of the same by the operations carried out with the graphical interface of server maintenance, access and remote execution to a server via powersell Web Access, etc. The Active Directory allows you to use the power of virtualization, including the use of SnapShots, mirroring and migrations like any other Hyper-V machine, but without the problems that they existed in version 2008 R2. Also, as a long-awaited novelty, a Recycle Bin functionality has been included in the Active Directory management, which allows you to recover a deleted object for a limited time.Continuing in the DA, the user/object registration and administration form has been greatly improved, and a new security level called Dynamic Access Control appears, which are rules based on content and, for example, prevent users from that are not in a specific OU can access text files that contain a credit card number.

Debugging and testing with VS2012 followed by the Pride Backend

At the beginning of the afternoon, after eating and continuing with the conversations, it was time for the final stretch of TechDay with the last sessions of the afternoon.

Opened Aurelio Porras telling us about the tools that comes with the latest version of Visual Studio to monitor the execution of our code without need for manual debugging (read F5).

This is how he taught us WebInspector for the Web, a set of tools similar to the debugging tools of browsers but hypervitalized. For a complete remote debugging and to avoid the famous ping-pong when QA breaks it and the developer doesn't reproduce it, Aurelio showed us Intellitrace , an impressive tool that allows normal debugging but in the code that is running on the customer.

And finally he taught us about static code analyzers and Clone Code, an analyzer that tells you – by equality or similarity – when you have duplicate code that you should refactor.

Finally, David Salgado once performed the magic of making a session very enjoyable eminently technical and based on pure and hard code that discussed, in the part where I was present, about the paramount importance of the backend.

Teaching, for example, the communication possibilities of the new Visual Studio 2012 and especially SignalIR, an ASP.NET API that makes life much easier for programmers building real-time client-server communications .

In short, a great event, an excellent organization, high-level presentations and speakers, and invaluable hallway conversations. See you at TechDay 2013.

The danger of walking through the corridors and meeting PaniTheBoss