Just in case anyone thinks a week at TechEd in Barcelona is a jolly, you are sadly mistaken. FIVE days of rapid fire presentations is total DATA overload, which despite the doing apparently nothing is extremely tiring.

So Day 4…..

Session 1. PHP on windows, now don’t laugh. Monday saw the release of fastCGI for windows server 2003, this is a Microsoft bolt on to run supporting CGI apps almost 15 times faster. CGI is traditionally very slow on windows due to the over head involved in creating and destroying a NEW process. CGI creates a NEW process for EVERY request. In fastCGI the process is persisted and re-used offering almost a 15 folder performance improvement. Add to that you can use asp.net forms authentication in front of the zend PHP and obtain the login credentials i may just have to try standing up a copy of WordPress on windows, Cuz I can !!!

Session 2. IIS7 on Server core, Server core is the NEW low foot print install for windows server 2008, it is not actually a SKU, but an install option you buy standard edition licence and install CORE or Full, (I wonder if they will rebrand ARCADE edition like the XBOX 360) Core will present some interesting challenges for the “right click” boys, as there is NO GUI, it is CMD line (hooray) or remote admin. I have never fully understood why a server needs a GUI, but my first server was novell 2, Shame that server CORE does not support managed code, so you can’t install a .net frame work, which sort of cripples a windows web server

Session 3. SQL Server indexing by Kimberly Tripp, OH MY GOD, a serious session on SQL indexing and tools and scripts., using DMVs on SQL 2005, she demonstrated scripts she had created that woudl recomend index creates and index drops. the most enlightening statement she made (which made so much sense , but i had never though of it before) dont just look at the long runing queries, but run a trace over the a fully daily workload and look for common queries, shaving 50% of a query which is run 5000 times day provides better overall performance gain than looking at the long runing query which only runs a few times a day.
 

Well it is actually day 5, and nearly time to go home, but i have only just found the time to to write this up
Yet another day of many sessions and information over load

Session 1. Microsoft search server, wow look like that have spent some time on this one, really cool fedarated queries etc , which being based on opensearch technology (which is fundamentally RSS) you could just add a normal RSS feed to the side of your normal search. Picture you corporate search engine has you TOP news article down the side….
I wonder if it could be tweaked into a feedburner type app by republishing RSS feeds

Session 2. missed that one and gave the IIS guys in the exhibition  hard time. Well worth it, deep dive into IIS7 and the IIS& FTP server (which is not part of server 2008, but a separate install for some reason)

Session 3. Interactive session, SQL server best practices, did not realy get much from this session, it would appear my current recommendations for SQL security in a WEB farm are pretty good

Session 4. Far too tired, for more data in take to did a LAB on server 2008

Very Busy day, 6 Session, some good some bad

session 1, IIS7 to IT Pro’s by Issac Roybal
Tonnes of really good new features, many of which directly address problem i have experianced over the past FOUR years, I wonder when i can get it on the ground

Session 2, went to a?? great hand on, self paced LAB on configuring IIS7, this actually left me with more Questons than answers

Session 3, Lunch team slot on Windows Home Server, fantastic home Pc backup and central storage box, full support for up to 10 media connect 2.0 devices, (shame i dont have any YET !!!!!!), built in web server to allow uncle jim to acces a slice of your library, yoiu even yourself from that nasty hotel 1000 miles from home! soon to be shipping with a pucker public cert on the homeserver.com domain with full support for UPNP and dynamic DNS too.

Session 4, MORE IIS7, but how to used the new shared config feature in a WEB farm, so many NEW features to fix problems i spent weeks writing scritps for in IIS6. (met a dutch bloke yoiu managed a web farm doing 150,000,000 hits per day, make my intranet 8,000,000 per hit look pathetic)

Session 5, SQL server storage and performance, some excitable lunatic talking about 32CPU server with 512 Gig of ram and 92 hard disk spindles just for the data

??Session 6, Windows server 2008 core, seem like a nice idea, but with .net being “managed code” it cant be deployed on CORE, making the IIS CORE version suitable for ASP (yeh right), ??HTML and PHP (i think DONT QOUTE ME)

ah well time to return to the hotel for nosh and an early night, unless i can find seom of the guys i met in redmond in april

just left the Keynote speech at MS TechEd in Barcelona
some really great stuff on the horizon, Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, system center etc,
However the most impressive thing for my, as a geek, was Home server, and dedcated windows based server for the home, automated back up household PCs, support from windows media devices such as XBOX 360. Full PC backup and restire etc etc

Far too many usefull feature for a home PC enironmrnt too mention here

however some what ammusing was when the speaker asked how many people are running a “server” at home over 20 % of the audiance raised their hands,
So I am NOT the only one