Welcome to Teched 2013

We’re starting off with some type of James Bond video. Chase scene with a really cool car. Not quite French Connection, but good. OK, that was, if a little ballsy, “you’ll never crack it” Jeez, how to upset people. And the car from the video drives out on stage.

And that is Brad Anderson arriving. Guy7 looks like he does crossfit.

“We spend our time making other people great”

He’s laying out the path of the future and, shock of shocks, he said SQL. Out loud. On stage. Twice. That’s pretty cool. SQL Server often feels like a red-headed step child.

Iain McDonald, comes out to introduce information about Windows Core. The OS covers everything from the phone to tablets to xbox to your servers. The concept is that Windows powers the things that let you go and “get your stuff.” They’re happy with Windows 8… OK.

Video of customers and they’re use of Win8. they’re showing a lot of tablets working at NASCAR Toyota, Emeriates Airlines, some college, Sheraton. Interesting overview of how people are using the tablets & Win8.

The next version of Windows 8 will be free. Preview bits on June 26th.

8:44am

he’s showing some of the stuff that is new in 8.1. The tiles are more locked in, so it’s not so easy to accidently rearrange your screens. Then he showed how you can export your screens to XML through PowerShell (!) in order to set up a layout that can be forced onto users. It’s a great way to manage corporate accounts. They’re adding additional security levels called assigned access which applies further control over exactly what can be displayed or accessed within the system, regardless of any other security settings. Neat trick.

They’re going to really be focused on BYOD, mobile, enterprise apps, and business apps for Win8. I’m afraid some of my notes were lost due to a computer crash (I’m less & less in love with the Lenovo W530).

He’s showing off some really cool new hardware that’s coming out. Including this GIANT tablet that he put Balmers  face on then did “Windows, Windows, Windows” which was pretty funny.

9:00. They really are focused on tablets in a major way.

Now they’re going to switch to the services. 50% of employees in their 20s believe that BYO is a right (yeah, and they’re also not employeed… hmmm… maybe a few fewer rights and a little more work, just a thought). Anyway, they’re focusing on the ability to easily move your data from place to place, deveice to device without you having to do all sorts of work.

They’re working off of Active Directory through Windows Azure Active Directory, so that everything will run off a single sign-ins. A single identity to multiple locations. Slick. they’re working with Systems Center Configuration Manager to connect to something new called Windows Intune which allows people to manage devices as long as they have access to the internet.

Ah, the car was an Aston Martin. Looked cool.

9:10 Microsoft is releasing Windows Server 2012 R2 (sigh) and System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Intune

Molly Brown (unsinkable) Principal Development Lead, going over how they’re empowering people-centric IT (I still need to work on a blog post about that concept). You can now put a policy on a user, then allow the user to add a device and receive the policy onto that device, all without involving IT directly. Neat trick.

9:12 Once the device is registered, not only do you get the data, but you can get your software onto the new device. That’s really pretty slick.

9:17 While yeah, wiping the device would be the better approach, you can leave the workplace with an app and it will remove all the corporate stuff. I assume you can also reject a device.

It will work with IOS and Android too. Hmmm… interesting.

So they’ve shown the OS, new devices and the new security. Time to move on to apps & DevOps. First thing out of his mouth, Windows Azure. People, learn it.

They are deploying hundreds of thousands of servers a year, around the world. The global data centers are now in Asia, including public cloud access within mainland China. That’s huge. They are also supporting global support, local teams and local currencies.

Next up Bert Craven from EasyJet. This company has moved to Azure in a major way. They’ve just moved to an allocated seating model instead of allowing people to “run at the airplane as fast as possible” to get their seats. These guys are mixing on-premise (s) and Azure. In order to manage seats, they simply, quickly, built Azure to manage seats. this allowed them to add it to their standard app with minimal work.

They sold extra flight capacity for the summer in December, so they expanded capacity on the fly. Nice to see exactly what MS keeps telling us is the future actually at work.

9:28 Scott Guthrie VP of Azure. He’s showing immediately how you can use Azure VMs with Dev/Test to immediately put together multiple machines and control when they’re running. This speeds up systems allocation and development. You can still deploy locally.

No longer charging for stopped VMs! WHOOOOPP!

They are now doing per minute billing.

They are allowing MSDN use rights on VMs without charge (I assume if you already have MSDN)

They have a new dev/test rate for MSDN licenses (which explains what I saw on the portal this morning).

You also get MSDN credits to work off your Azure system. $50 – Pr, $100 Premium, $150 Ultimate

This is very exciting stuff. They’ve made it much easier to manage your accounts and access all sorts of great things through Azure. This takes away one of the biggest barriers to getting people to try out this new technology. Well done Microsoft.

9:37 Brian Harry, Technical Fellow. He’s here to talk about Visual Studio. They’re shipping Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013. A preview will be available at the Build conference.

Oh wow, they’re focusing on continuous improvement, aka continuous development. Interesting & cool (especially since my company has been focused on this for a while). They’re creating more management & record keeping, messaging, etc., through TFS. Interesting, but not thrilling.

9:44 MS is setting up a release process software including environments, flows and configuration settings as part of Visual Studio. Very interesting.

Now we’re talking data (yay). Data is exploding, which I think everyone knows. Analytics for everyone makes a huge difference, which is a good idea, but I’m still not sure it works that well.

Quentin Clark is now on stage. SQL SERVER WHOOP!!!

He’s talking about how all the data can be sourced, typed and collected. So yeah, big data, but there’s still all sorts of other sources too and all of it has to be combined as much as possible. I’m there. It all goes back to data. Quentin says “Data changes everything.” It’s true. The more you understand, the better your decisions are. It’s that simple. The sales pitch is, from Data to Insight. Find, combine, manage data. Form theories, analyze and refine the data. Take action and operationalize. In short, automate and make repeatable “ah-ha” motives.

The new version of SQL Server will be SQL Server 2014. It will include in-memory databases with transactional processing for major systems. They’re expanding in a whole bunch of other areas as well. I’m sure more details will be revealed soon. No dates (except the year) announced yet.

He’s showing a lot of cool data. They’re playing with showing who has the most people in the conference and then zoom in. You can see the titles based on who is there. Fun stuff, the more useful and interesting stuff is showing how the number and type of businesses going to the different sessions from the different attendees. It’s actually slick. You can see a lot of information, pretty easily (although I do wonder, how much work is required to set it up, always my question).

Next is showing Data Explorer to look at hadoop data that captured a twitter stream of mentions of #msteched. They’re showing how excel can build queries, that can then be repeated, either through excel directly, or through a query.

Nicely done Quentin.

Next up is talking about the new Data Center, hybrid. It’s the future. Accept it. Learn it. Love it. Hey, I gave a pre-con on just this topic. I might even be giving a pre-con on this at the SQL PASS Summit (maybe, we’ll see).

Trek Bikes is using Azure to support their retailers. We have a Trek bike shop in hometown. I may need to go & visit it to see how it works if the guy will let me see his stuff. “They’re just HyperV VMs” That’s right.

Pretty sure that wraps it up. I may go get in line for a Surface now.