Tech-Ed 2010 Berlin – Was it worth it? A definitive Yes, but!

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Tech-Ed 2010 is over and next year I will have to once again ask myself is it worth it? Standing at the Messe’s train station with around 3k other delegates (the other 3k at the taxi stand) I have no chance to board the first train that arrives, so as I wait for the next one I reflect a little.

To take away my summary, I will be coming back and it will still be one of the major events of the year. But Tech-Ed has lost some of its magic. Let me break that down into Content, Contacts and Context.

Content

The most important part of any conference (for me at least) is content. Different points of view, shiny new technology and buckets full of inspiration. Looking back the three big topics for me (both from my enterprise day-job and start-up dream world) were: OData, Sharepoint in the Cloud and (as always) process experience from those grandmasters of development.

Know-How and stories from CapGemini and the always entertaining Stephen Forte once again reminded me that where I work we have come so far from our early days but still have a long way to go. It is a never ending journey in a constantly changing field.

SharePoint is always interesting and the new Office 365 (the service formerly known as BPOS) offering brings SharePoint 2010 into the cloud. Azure was a hot topic and a couple of sessions tried to build a bridge between the cloud and SharePoint. What was presented seemed like early prototypes and not production ready yet, but we may soon see some ShareAzure or AzurePoint solutions utilizing the best of both worlds. A highlight was the chance to talk to Daniel McPherson (Twitter @danmc) about his upcoming SharePoint AppStore. It’s in beta at the moment and already great for the current BPOS offering. Can’t wait to see how it evolves and hopefully you’ll see some of my products there soon.

Last but not least OData. Before I came to Berlin I thought it was rather uninteresting. It took until the last session of the conference by (Austria’s own) Mario Szpuszta to really get my fired up about the possibilities. Together with the next Entity Framework (coming in Q1) and AppFabric I see a lot of potential to change (and simplify) some major parts of our standard architecture approach.

Finally Windows Phone 7 was the sexy topic of the conference. Sadly not for me since I’m not interested in consumer apps (yet) and the Enterprise story has been pushed to the next release. So that’s a topic for next year. (But it is a neat phone…)

Contacts

I was coming to Berlin expecting to see only a small group of fellow Austrians but I heard the group was larger than last year. But Tech-Ed is about the people you don’t meet so often. I enjoyed roaming the exhibition halls and technical learning center. The Microsoft product teams and invited guests were helpful, interested and just know their stuff. I wouldn’t mind visiting just the tlc every couple of months to talk with those guys about current (high-level, but they know the details too) issues. I’m usually not a big fan of exhibitions, but I visited almost every stand on the first day (during the Keynote) and got all the answers I was looking for and some others too.

Context

Up until now I have mostly praise for the conference. Sadly the context has been on a decline since I visited my first Tech-Ed in Barcelona. Each year recession has hit the conference and this year was no exception. Costs are cut at all ends. There was the lunch bag affair of ’08 (2 warm meals and 3 lunch bags on first, last and country drink day) and this year’s Turnbeutelbag drama. After talking with some Microsoft representatives it is clear that the conference is costly (even though it was sold out) and to be able to put on the show every year without making more loss that the year before they have to shave off some of the bonus material. I understand but I hope Tech-Ed finds back to it’s glory days. The event team improves the experience as best they can every year: the Berlin Messe is a labyrinth and the navigation was drastically improved this year, registration was swift, WIFI was very good and snacks were plenty.

To all who went and all who will be going, I hope to see you next year. Thanks everybody and stealing one of the lesser known Microsoft slogans: “Create Software – Change the World”. (What a dramatic ending…)

Visio 2010 Background Layers – Hooray; Copying them crops the image – Boo

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I just recently discovered background layers in Visio (yes I’m ashamed it took so long and may refrain from calling me a Visio power user for a couple of weeks). Anyhow, if you don’t know about them yourself, create a new page in a visio document, right-click on the page and go to “Page Setup”. Simply set the page to “Background” and then go the page you want to have as a foreground. Again “Page Setup” and select the Background page you just created. Voila.

But I just ran into something annoying in Visio 2010 (may actually also happen in versions before 2010, but I just noticed in 2010). If you copy a complete page (=pressing Ctrl-C while nothing on the page is selected) and you have a background layer, Visio gets confused and messes up the copied image. It crops the image, makes it smaller somehow or whatever – but it’s definetely messed up. Continue for a quick-fix.

Steps to reproduce the issue

1. Create a background (set the page to “Background” in Right-click > Page Setup > Type).

2. Create a foreground page with that background and copy it.

3. Paste into your favorite paint application.


You see there are margins of the image missing. Don’t know why, but I only found one way of fixing it.

Fixing it

1. Create a large canvas (ideally filled with white and a white line – here in yellow just for demonstration purposes) on the background page which spans the complete page.


2. Copy and paste as before and voila the page is complete.

This is not as bad a fix as it seems, because the large yellow canvas is not selectable (like anything on the background) in the foreground pages.

SharePoint PeoplePicker is not displaying any AD Users? or “Why can’t I add user permissions in WSS?”

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Today I was assigned an incident where the SharePoint administrators could not add permissions to a WSS site for a specific Active Directory user. The problem was the People Picker was not displaying any users – it just said “User not found” regardless of which substring I entered (and I ensured the substring was present in an existing Active Directory user’s name).

There are a couple of resources on the net for:

  • People Picker only shows a partial list of AD users
  • People Picker only shows a list of AD in specific OUs
  • People Picker has a bad day and just doesn’t like you today

But none applied to or solved my problem, my PP didn’t show any error, it just didn’t find any users.

One clue was that directly after the installation it actually worked and since then “nothing had changed”. Two existing users that were added after installation were still in the PeoplePicker cache, so I confirmed that it must have worked at some time in the past.

In Event Viewer I searched for errors during of shortly after my searched, but nothing obvious appeared. I then filtered for only “errors and warnings” and those that happened after the installation date and (apart from the classic DCOM permissions errors under a 2008 R2 installation) it showed me that about 6 days after installation the server started having NETLOGON errors along the lines of “Computer could not be authorized.” This continued until today. Turns out for some reason the computer account of the server in Active Directory got screwed up and after

  • detaching the server from the domain
  • manually deleting the computer account in Active Direcotry
  • and rejoining the server to the domain

everything worked again as usual.

HTH, Alex

Big>Days and StudentBig>Days 2009 – Session Files

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Microsoft Big>Days and Student Big>Days are almost over and I haven’t uploaded my slides and source yet. For the Microsoft Big>Days you can find all our source code and much more at http://www.codeplex.com/bigdays09.

All my session files at the Student Big>Days: “ASP.NET MVC with SharpArchitecture” are available on SkyDrive.

Have fun, thanks for attending. Any questions, feel free to contact me!

Only secure passwords please, but no special characters, symbols or spaces please.

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There are a lot of these personal finance planners online, most recently lil’ mint.com has become the darling of the techcrunch crowd. They all make life so easy by pulling my transactions from my bank account, credit cards etc. But am I the only one who really thinks that passing on my online banking details to a these sites is just a little bit dangerous or even crazy? Sure, they all guarantee that they are safe because they are using SSL (book tip: read http://www.webhackingexposed.com/). Most of them don’t store your username and password, which actually means they pass on your details to some other financial service provider which -of course- is way cooler. But this service really made me chuckle (the sort of “harhar … har … WTF?” chuckle)

The FAQ:

web11The registration page:

pwd21

Maybe I’ve become overconscious for security topics since I started working for www.securityresearch.at but if you want to avoid a mistake like this on your app give us a call… I’m not handing out my bank details on any terms but at least our team can help you reach state-of-the-art levels of security.

Coming up: Student Big>Days and Big>Days 2009

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This year I will be speaking at two events around Austria.

The first is the annual Big>Days event that is visiting four Austrian cities. I’ll be speaking about three tier ASP.NET applications together with Microsoft’s own Mario Spzuzta. Look forward to a demo packed ASP.NET session covering out-of-the-box scenarios and looking into the upcoming ASP.NET MVC Framework (btw: RC2 released today).

Starting this tuesday in Vienna is the successor of our successful academic community launch event. We have taken on the theme of the business event and gave it some “student” style. The Student Big>Days will be visiting numerous universities and cities starting from March 10 until the end of April. So if you are interested in .NET and surrounding technologies check out the website: www.studentbigdays.at. Even though March has a busy shedule I’ll be speaking in Vienna and twice in Salzburg on ASP.NET.