So the first morning session at TechEd today was a wasteland. I thought it, and at least three other conversations I overheard at breakfast confirmed this as well. A small sample of the sessions offered:

• Application Lifecycle Management and Line-of-Business Project Development Using Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services: Scalable Reporting
• Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 Disaster Recovery
• Creating Portals That Last: Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, Governance and Information Architecture
• Building an Enterprise-Wide Instrumentation Solution Using the Microsoft BizTalk BAM Infrastructure

Whooo! When does the party stop? And so it was that I found myself at "Why IT Pros Will Want to Deploy Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 NOW!". Now going in I had joked here and to others about the sheer number of "Hey you need to upgrade to Vista, please" sessions that were offered at this year's TechEd, so I figured what the heck, I'll go check it out. Plus it was being given by a non-MS guy, so there might be a semblance of objectivity.

A quick note about the Orange County Convention Center: There are two main areas where rooms are located, north and south, each having about 4 rooms that are capable of holding somewhere north of 1000 people. This session was in the largest of these rooms, a rough count of the chairs revealing seating for at least 1700. Plus it was the first session of the day (with everyone there for the free breakfast, every morning session I've had in two years now has been nearly full), going up against damn near nothing else on the schedule.

So it is perhaps telling about the state of Vista that there probably wasn't more than 500 people at this session.

The session itself, as well as the speaker, was OK; nothing special but not horrible either. About halfway through it became a weird plea to all of us to move to IPv6. Did you know that if only you would upgrade all your workstations to Vista, and maybe also do the small, trivial task of upgrading all your switches and routers, you could realize an 80% increase in network performance? Yeah there might be a few legacy apps that don't like IPv6 but that's the problem of the developers of the software and undoubtedly you can just get a patch or quit using it altogether. And oh yeah, in the future you won't need a border router, because IPv6 has enough IP addresses for every star in the known universe to have 2^52 IP addresses, and IPSec is built in so there's no need anymore for NAT. And anyway IPv6 has super powers that allow it to just bypass NAT. Yeah.

OK so I made it sound pretty crazy, but really it wasn't bad. But still, if the best reason a consultant, of all people, can come up with for moving to Vista is to basically guilt us into moving to IPv6, it says a lot doesn't it? To me the real signal here is that MS is even talking about Windows 7 in any way, shape, or form so close to the release of Vista SP1 (a.k.a., "It's a real OS now guys"). Sure they have to pimp it to get as many sales as possible, but personally I believe they've already written it off internally.

Other than that the conference has been OK. Pretty interesting session this afternoon about Windows Logon, LM, NTLM, Kerberos, etc. Got a pretty good PDF that does a good job of explaining how Kerberos works. I've come to the conclusion, though, that going to TechEd every year is kind of a waste: just not enough new and/or different from last year to make it worth the effort/cost. Told my boss as much as well, so likely I will not be going to LA next year. Which is fine, since I'm sure I would be the worst person in the world if I jetted off to LA for a week and left Jenn with a couple of....counting.....~8 month old girls to deal with by herself.