Sorry to be reporting "yesterday's news today" but I was not feeling well yesterday (I think my room service was bad). But hey, these are the dangers you face when you have to accept an all expense paid trip to Boston to explore the latest and greatest innovation Microsoft has to offer. For those of you who are worried, extra strength tylenol did the trick and though I'm not feeling 100% better, I am back on my feet, meeting our customers and demonstrating the great new features in IIS7. So here is the word from Wednesday, I will get you today's update after the TechEd party tonight which I'm sure you're dying to here about.
"LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLE!!!" blasts throughout the double capacity ballroom. For an 8:30 talk, everyone is very suprised how pumped Chris Adams is to give his IIS7 Overview talk. Our community program manager with his southern twang, starts going over the key enhancements IIS6 before outlining the new features in Security, Configuration, System Management, Extensibility and Troubleshooting. Unfortunately, Chris would soon hit some bumps in the road. His keyboard was acting up and when he tries to edit ApplicationHost.config, lines of zeros start typing themselves into the file. I was pretty disappointed that the TechEd staff hadn't caught this one before his talk but I guess these things can happen to the best of us.
In general, I was a big fan of the talk. Could it have gone better, yes, but Chris gets another chance tomorrow to rock the house. When Chris does these talks, he makes pains to point out all the little things Admins will just love that we normally don't mention such as copying over ApplicationHost.config with a backup which you can't do in IIS6. Chris has a passionate style that many of you are familiar with from the IIS webcast series he has been leading for a few years now. That passion can make a lesser feature like detailed errors (shown above) appear larger and more useful, cool demo even more special. One his demos that went really well was showing how to extend the UI with custom modules. He added in a reporting module that spit out bar graphs and pie charts of the most frequent requests. I'm the IIS product manager and I hadn't even seen this one in action yet. I have to tell you I was blown away by the power of IIS7's extensibility. Hopefully, the customers in the audience were also so blown away that they forgot about the keyboard issues.
After hitting up this early session, we moved downstairs to the IIS booth to talk to customers. We met with a guy from R&D at Accenture who came to TechEd more prepared than any attendee I have met yet. This guy was the Ultimate TechEd Attendee. I'm serious, he had set up a terminal server to his production machines back home and was going around to each of the product groups getting free troubleshooting services from the various program managers and devs on hand. When he reached our station, he wanted guidance on migrating an ASP.NET application to IIS7 and trying to use forms auth to control access to the app. Program manager, Thomas Deml and Dev Lead, Andrew Lin figured out he didn't enable anonymous auth in addition to forms auth. He was so excited when he got it to work. Apparently, we were the last step. The app gets some system support data sent over via a web service in the UK. Then it uses an AJAX interface to populate the data to the page which *now* is securely hosted on an IIS7 Beta 2 box. <sweet!>
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