Almost done! This has been so much fun. We've been to Milan and Zurich and now we just finished up in Moscow and Israel. I started this blog entry from the airport in Istanbul as I waited for the flight from Tel Aviv. Unfortunately, our internet situation was Israel was spotty at best so publishing this one has been a bit delayed. Alright with apologies out of the way, let me tell you about the weekend we had in Russia.
On Friday we joined a Microsoft Russia event, WebDevCon '06 that had started the day before. It turned out to be a very hard day for the speakers. With the traffic in Moscow, the ride to the event took an hour and it was over 30 C (86 F) so Chris and Alexis were HOT. Chris even had to ditch the MS event shirt when he wasn't presenting. MS Russia didn't have headsets for the speakers so they had to hold a microphone to their face all day. Many of the attendees only spoke Russian (who would have guessed?) and even though the translators were champs, this still made it more difficult to handle questions.
At least we got questions though. Non-native English speakers can be very reserved with the questions. Alexis presented on ASP.NET, Log Parser and IIS7 again, like in Zurich. Despite the heat, she did very well. This picture is from her Log Parser talk. We really can't believe how few IIS Admins over here use Log Parser. I am quite glad we included this session in the agenda. From my last post I promised to get more details on her killer log parser demo.
What she was showing was how she can have an email sent detailing significant events most recently written to the IIS logs. This is different from her other demos which use log parser to extract data from an entire log file. Log parser’s CheckPoint feature allows you do incremental parsing, i.e. grab only data that has not been parsed before. You have to create a CheckPoint file to stores the log parser state for that file. Then it is simple to use log parser to create an html report, then use a batch file to periodically run that query and email you the report.
Despite the heat, Alexis got through her log parser talk and got a break during lunch. The above picture shows Renat Minazhdinov (right) our MS contact in Russia who organized this event. Renat was amazingly helpful and fun.
After getting fed, Chris wrapped up his day with the Debug Diag talk. The session was 15 minutes shorter at this event which made it harder to get all the demos completed on time. Debug Diagnostics needs time to analyze memory dumps and when you are up on stage with less time than normal, it is brutal to have the analysis take more time then normal. Chris is our demo pro so he presented on the memory leaks section while the analysis finished.
He got quite a few questions about the tool which should come as no surprise; he just resolved a crash, a hang and a memory leak in under 60 minutes. All we had left was Alexis’s IIS7 talk. She did great the only problem she ran into was an AppCmd command that seemed to not execute. It was really a silly misstep - she had some text in the command line window selected so when she hit enter to execute, the command line was just hanging out waiting for her to do something with the text she had selected. She got it working and had a lot of questions about IIS7 afterwards which we generally take as a good sign.
When we got done, it was time to go to dinner. It was still very hot and this cab ride took pretty long as well since traffic in Moscow is awful. On the flipside we got to see a lot of Russian monuments which was very cool. The dinner was excellent. All the new meals we get to try are both fascinating and delicious. I had the Wild Deer (sorry Bambi).
Saturday in Moscow was fantastic. Poor Chris was sick so it was just Alexis and I on our tour of Moscow. The pictures below are some of the highlights. I will blog another post later tonight about how Israel went on Monday. Stay tuned, we’re almost home now.
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