Microsoft TechEd Europe 2014

After years of trying to get a place, I’m lucky enough to be spending the coming week at the premier Microsoft conference for Dev’s and IT Pro’s this side of the Atlantic- TechEd Europe 2014.

It’s Europe’s largest annual tech conference and there’s a lot of content on offer- over 600 sessions to choose from during the week. Whilst I’m not going to see all of them, I’m hoping to spend the week absorbing as much information as possible.

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As an exercise in both sharing information and also to aid my personal retention I’m planning to produce a brief and structured summary to accompany my no-doubt copious notes. I’ve chosen for simplicity to summarise each session in five bullet points- you can call them “takeaways” if you must. I’m also hoping to publish some or all of these highlights to this blog, so keep your eyes peeled!

So, to get me started and make sure I can count to 5, what do I want to achieve this week?

  1. Server. Learn more about Windows Server generally. Mainly from an onsite perspective but acknowledging the existence of the fluffy white elephant in the room called “Cloud”.
  2. SCOM. Go hands-on with Systems Centre Operations Manager. One of my projects this year is to overhaul our service monitoring and reporting setup and this may be a key part.
  3. Visual Studio, ASP.NET. Keeping up with the changes and opportunities in the dev side of my DevOps IT life.
  4. PowerShell. I’m hoping to both firm up and expand my existing knowledge here. I see PowerShell as a key technology in Windows Server management.
  5. Connections. Even in the run up to the event I’ve increased my interactions with other IT Pro’s through social media. In-person events are great for establishing these links.
    2014 is my first time at Tech-Ed Europe