So where did we leave off? Oh right, I was telling you all about how IIS program managers, Alexis Eller and Chris Adams, and I had arrived in Zurich to spend Wednesday teaching Swiss Web administrators best practices for managing Web applications on IIS6 and what to expect once IIS7 is released.
After Milan, we all became very confident in front of the non-native English speaking audiences. I was much more comfortable MC'ing this event than the one we just finished in Italy, so after delivering the kickoff, the audience was ready to get right into it. I know I'm from Microsoft marketing but I really try not to start the day with a lot of marketing fluff. We want to just get the logistical event stuff out of the way and cover over IIS7 release dates and key features in a quick and general way. Then we dive right into sessions.
This audience had a good mix of administrators and developers. The event is called Web Administration Summit but developers are definitely invited as well, and not just because they are interested in IIS from that development perspective, but because many times at their shop, they either manage IIS or teach an IT guy how to better manage IIS.
The first talk Efficient Deployment and Management of ASP.NET 2.0 Application on IIS6, was led by Alexis and it seemed to be a good topic because the audience was very engaged and they asked a lot of questions. One attendee in the front claimed he's running both versions of the .NET Framework on his servers and after installing .NET 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0 applications deployed and ran properly without him doing anything extra. This seemed simply not possible after we had just explained that you needed to set up different app pools for each version of the CLR. Alexis knows her stuff *very* well but we consulted with Chris and realized this customer's implementation is behaving completely normal. When you install the.NET Framework 2.0, IIS makes .NET 2.0 the default framework to be selected for all newly created app pools.
But that is why it is great to have more than one speaker on these roadshows. The extra perspective and experience (especially from an old dawg PSS guy like Chris) is so useful. The speakers don't have completely overlapping backgrounds so they have been supporting one another and learning from one another throughout the tour (though I have probaby been learning the most). I sat in Chris's Enterprise Management talk again and learned many new things I didn't pick up the first time around. The scripts and tools he shows off in that talk are some of the most popular features of the event. Because they can simplify management so much, they really excite the audience, and when all demos work (like they did this time) it can create quite a magical moment. Imagine watching all our hard work from over an hour of configuration and tweaking, be blown away when Chris restores IIS6 to its orignal install state. Now imagine, running one IISBack.vbs script and bringing it all back to life in an instant. It can be that easy if you know how to use the right tools.
A critical tool that this audience did not seem to be using was Log Parser. You can use log parser for mining data from many kinds of logs but if you run IIS you should really take the time to learn this tool before the next time you dig through your IIS logs. Alexis explained the tool well during her log parser talk here. We didn't have the talk in Italy so I was curious to see how it would be received. You do lose some people after lunch, five sessions can be a long day, but Alexis's good demos seemed to keep everyone engaged. She did this one where she writes a log parser script that leverages an SMTP server to mail the admin different kinds of alerts depending on the errors or warnings listed in the logs. It is really cool and I will have to get her to explain it to me in greater detail so I can blog all about it.
Anyway, it was a great day and as you can tell from the pic above we were having fun. Does Chris really think he can take down the Master Chief? Maybe if he's completely rested and energized. He seemed pretty tired after Wednesday's event and almost didn't come out to dinner with us. But we made him come and hopefully that will help preserve his zest.
We went to a place called Rosali's in the Zurich city center. Marcel, our host from MS Switzerland, reccomended it, but not just for the food and wine, which we did throroughly enjoy (can you believe one of us ordered fillet of foal? I'll let you guess who thought that would be funny). Rosali's is right next to a large outdoor theatre/beer garden that has been set up to watch the world cup matches.
The football hooligans came out to their "football garden" en force. Holland and Argentina were playing and the place was packed. With World Cup going on Europe has been extra fun. So far we've watched matches with the locals in each country we've visted.
This time we did remember to commemorate the occasion with an IIS7onTour pic. If you have seen Thomas Deml's IIS7 extensibility talk then you will totally understand what I'm talking about. Basically, we get a DVD of IIS7 in a picture where ever we go and then use it in the PictureDirListing module demos. Very cool stuff in that demo, but I can't go into it now. Italy just won their match and the cars are honking so much here that I can't concentrate any more. Stay tuned to IIS tour, this weekend we'll be reporting back from Moscow!
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