TechEd 2007: The Story So Far

ORLANDO - We've passed the midway point here of this week-long affair, and we're noticing the effect that the more practical, toned down, brass-tacks Microsoft -- without a glistening new operating system hovering twelve months into the future -- is having on attendees. It's a mixed bag, actually. While I happen to like the difference, I've noticed my feelings haven't been shared by everyone here - the presenters, the press, the developers, or the administrators.

Though I've said this before, it continues to amaze me how the type and level of information that, just 30 years ago, would have had to have been taught in colleges, is being presented by one company during the course of one week.

While self-advertising is always a part of Microsoft's purpose, it is always one of the most intense and information-rich educational weeks of training produced by any company anywhere in the world, for people other than its own employees. For some, it's an informational overload - and as attendees reached the Wednesday hump, you could start to see the first signs of distress. As one fellow told me today, "I think about twelve straight hours of Microsoft is about all a man can take."

For many of us in the technical press, however, it's a feast. On ordinary days in March or May when the headlines are sparse, the forsythias are budding, and it isn't easy to maintain one's sense of priorities, a journalist can wish TechEd came around every month.

It's like a week full of twelve-hour-long interviews where all the answers one needs are served up in a vast buffet, with 75% of the answers without him even having to ask questions. You can find a story here almost anywhere just by listening, maybe not even staying in the same session, maybe just following the crowd, letting them tell you what's interesting and what's not.

Last Friday, we came up with a list of five [cue music] flashpoints - topics we expected would generate the most buzz during the show. Here at the half, let's see how well our technology barometer was working:

• How warm is Microsoft's embrace of Web standards? Maybe warmer than it has been, but not exactly an embrace just yet. To help bolster the company's image, it hired Web Standards Project leader Molly Holzschlag as a kind of technical evangelist. On Monday, she presented a session where she gave the audience several reasons for themselves and their companies to adopt CSS for laying out their Web pages. No one knows CSS better than Holzschlag, who had actually worked with MSN before several years ago, helping Internet Explorer version 3 along its way to adopting layout standards at all.
  

  Designing Web sites from the content out, Molly Holzschlag told her audience, empowers them to be able to create the so-called "semantic Web" that has been a buzzword for so long. Yes, that's a MacBook Pro on her desk.

  At the Monday session, Holzschlag learned that a frightfully low percentage of her audience was actually using CSS on a regular basis. Most everyone knew it, but not all businesses had adopted it. The reasons we heard weren't because they had to conform to some artificially low concept of where Microsoft had set the bar for standards. It's because companies hadn't invested in the technology to make CSS simple to deploy - in a way, one of the same faults for which Microsoft had been blamed in the time of IE5 and IE6. What's the best tool we could possibly use to make CSS layouts work for us, one attendee asked her? The human mind, she responded.

  I had a similar question about how CSS tools could evolve to meet consumer expectations, but to my surprise, I didn't get to ask it. A Microsoft "minder," for lack of a better word, cut off my question in mid-sentence, to our embarrassment. Perhaps this isn't the place for press inquiries, we were told. Shouldn't we have filed a notice with PR for a one-on-one interview, rather than interrupt a session full of actual customers? In over two decades of covering Microsoft, this is the first time I had ever been cut off by a minder.

  Eventually, Holzschlag reassured me (a little red-faced herself), I will get to ask that question, though I must admit that, since that time, I've thought of a few other interesting follow-ups.

• Will Windows without Windows take off? Some of the most important sessions that will answer this question once and for all, come later in the week, including a scheduled demonstration of Server Core. From what we've seen thus far, it's still a pretty new concept for attendees, who may still be looking for the "catch" like recipients of "Humongous Discounts!" offers by mail. The fact that the Server Core command line runs in a window, for instance, is actually believed by some to be an indicator of a sinister GUI lurking in the distance.

  But far more attendees know about PowerShell this year than last. While a million downloaders or more may have acquired it already, the general knowledge of how it works seems lacking, as evidenced by some of the questions heard during a PowerShell session on Wednesday afternoon - still a little basic, configurational, first-stage. But the eagerness to learn the answers is certainly there. Microsoft .NET evangelist David Aiken today called PowerShell "the most powerful force in the entire universe."

Next: Snap, crackle, and pop...in that order.