TechEd India 2012

As always, attending a Microsoft technology conference (TechEd India 2012) was fun & educational. You can catch the clips here and other information online, so I will keep this post to a few sessions I managed to attend.

The 3-day conference happened at Hotel Lalit Ashok, Bangalore, a fine hotel, but as a conference venue, I try to like it, but I can’t. The map they give at registration gets less comprehensible year after year; I was pretty sure that if I ran in circles, I could have found the rooms faster than the map or by asking the event folks. And this happens even though I am supposed to be familiar with the topography & room names, as I have been here for many years now, either as a speaker or as an attendee.

In Windows 8, apart from Metro UI & WinRT, there have been incremental improvements over Windows 7 in boot time, Task Manager, Explorer file copy & so on. But I learned that Windows Server “8” offers significant improvements over Windows Server 2008 R2. I attended Windows Server “8” Modern Workstyle, enabled by Pracheta Budhwar & Windows Server 8: The Power of Many Servers, the Simplicity of One, by Kamal Jain. Both were introduction sessions to new features in Windows Server “8”, lot of improvements have been made relevant for all use cases, from Single Server to Clusters. DHCP Resiliency, SAN storage copy offloading, Unified Server Manager, Hyper-V dynamic movement of running VMs & many more.

Demo Extravaganza by Harish Vaidyanathan & Nahas Mohammed was fun & entertaining. They showed a lot of cool stuff, including Windows 8 Keyboard shortcuts, roaming profiles, and more. When they were handing out “goodies” like Nokia Lumia 800s or T-shirts, the stampede-like scene near the front rows was scary.

Vinod Kumar‘s demos in Demo Extravaganza on Office 2010 tips were interesting; I knew the Access email data collection tip, but the PowerPoint Photo-Editing feature (Remove Background in the Format Ribbon) was new to me.

Day 2, the first session I went to, was Big Data & Elastic Cloud by Ramkumar Kothandaraman. He rocked with his practical insights & applications in real life for Big Data (How Target figured out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did, U.K. Man deported from LA for a joke tweet about Destroying America). His example for explaining MapReduce was awesome – making juice by first cutting fruits, then grouping them by fruit-family (Apples, Oranges) and then putting them through a blender.

One of the biggest challenges of using Big Data is setting up and configuring something like Hadoop & its relatives (Pig, Mahout, Hive, HBase, HDFS, ZooKeeper). Ramkumar demo’ed the upcoming cloud offering from Microsoft Hadoop on Azure (currently in invite only beta), this was exciting to me as it makes Hadoop approachable to every developer out there. You can program MapReduce functions with Java or JavaScript; Microsoft will likely add support for .NET Languages in upcoming releases. Out of the box, you get cool Graphing features to visualise data easily

The next talk I went to was a session by the MTC (Microsoft Technology Centre) team – Vinod Kumar, Govind Kanshi & Anirudda Deswandikar. MTC team rocks with their frank, practical advice on when to use & when not to use hyped technologies like ORM, Cloud, XML & Virtual Machine Platforms (Java, .NET). With all the marketing hype surrounding REST & Cloud, this talk was a bit of fresh air.

In the evening, I went to the last session, led by my fellow Microsoft Regional Director (RD) Stephen Forte (CSO, Telerik), on Agile Estimation. He was hilarious, using solid data to show why software estimates are always wrong at the beginning. You can only improve the estimate after each iteration; it is important to have many smaller iterations to improve it. He talked about using “User Stories” & Tracking Backlogs as techniques to capture user requirements & maintain sanity in the project process. You need to insist on having at least one user story for each page if the project is a website; a single line like “Replica of Amazon.com” is not acceptable. Stephen demoed how you can use PlanningPoker.com to improve estimations. The same talk he gave at TechEd USA is available here; don’t miss it.

He gave the following books for further reading:

• Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher
• User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn
• Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn
• Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby &  Diana Larsen

(Disclaimer: Microsoft India had given me a free pass to attend TechEd India as I am one of the Microsoft Regional Directors, an honorary title & partner program)