Tech Ed EMEA 2008 IT – Day 4

I attended a very interesting presentation this morning by Mikael Nystrom on creating a master image for SCVMM. We’ve been using VPCs for quite a while, in particular when building test systems for the developers to run their code on. Using a master image (or a series of master images) in SCVMM will help us speed up the delivery of these test systems.

Mark Russinovich (of sysinternals fame) gave an excellent presentation titled ‘The case of the unexplained’ which used a lot of examples of problems experienced running a number of applications on Windows to show a series of techniques that could be used to troubleshoot and find the root cause of the issue. Mark is an excellent speaker and I would urge you to see him talk (in particular on this subject) if you can. I can’t wait to get home and try some of the techniques he showed on one or two issues I’ve been seeing for a while.

Jeffrey Snover (the partner architect for PowerShell) ran through some demonstrations of PowerShell V2, which looks like a great leap forward from V1. In addition, V2 now comes with a visual editor, with debugging capability! A CTP of PowerShell V2 is available if you want to give it a go.

Steve Smith gave an excellent demonstration of the steps required to set up a load test against SharePoint using Visual Studio. I’m not a developer, but he gave me the confidence to have a go myself sometime soon.