These are the countdown gadgets on my desktop showing how much time remains until Microsoft TechEd (Orlando), Windows in Higher Education (Redmond), and my upcoming Disney Cruise Line vacation. I like to have something to look forward to, and these countdowns help keep me motivated to keep hanging on.

Today was a great day for TechEd enthusiasts like myself: TechEd 2012 blog bling is now available! That may not sound all that exciting to most of you, but for those of us who attend TechEd every year, it really is. These badges showcasing the conference logo, location, and dates are another reminder that we’re getting closer and closer to the real thing. We’re going to spend a week with thousands of other IT Pros and Developers, digging into the latest and greatest Microsoft products and technologies, meeting with vendors, making new connections, and having fun with old friends. You can’t blame us for getting excited can you? And having blog bling lets us advertise to the world that we’re psyched to be going to TechEd and encourage everyone else in the community to think about going too. See you in Orlando!

But I was talking about blogging. I had hoped to keep up with my ambitious plans this year with the still-hot geek accessory, the iPad… the iPad 2 to be exact.  Unfortunately blogging turned out to be something that did not work well with the iPad. I use WordPress for my blog, and the WordPress iOS app… well, it sucks… for anything more than simple text entry.  I still have not found a way to easily add a link without editing HTML code, and that is soooooo 1990’s. So I gave up.  Editing it via the web would have been OK, but trying to scroll in a text box without scrolling the entire page on the iPad proved fruitless as well. I’m sure I could pick a random 5-year old and ask him/her how to do it and they would sigh loudly, roll their eyes at the stupid old (42) man, and then proceed to do it so quickly that I miss it entirely.

And don’t even get me started on using Flickr. Another #fail on the iPad. So I gave up and will finish these half-written posts when I get home, hopefully before I forget all the technical stuff.  You’re just going to have to wait.  I’m sure all nine of you who read this blog could care less, but there might be a couple of you who stop by and find it interesting.

I’m sitting in my space at the TechEd Blogger Hub as I write this rundown of Day 1 (aka Monday) at TechEd. Good chance for me to top off my phone battery and try to get caught up. One disclaimer, I’m writing this on Wednesday, so my recollections may be off a bit.

The day started off like every TechEd Monday, with the Keynote Session. This was the first keynote in many years without Bob Muglia, Senior VP of Server and Tools Business (STB) who is leaving Microsoft this summer. Instead we had Robert Wahbe, VP of STB, for the IT Pro side, and Jason Zander, VP of Visual Studio, for the Dev side. More importantly for me, I was going to see it all from the front row as one of the winners of the TechEd VIP contest.

The view was great, but as keynotes go it wasn’t anything special. It wasn’t bad, just nothing earth-shattering was announced or demoed. I noticed a Kinect sensor on stage so I knew we we going to have some demo that involved it. Wound up being someone interacting with the WorldWide Telescope. Very cool, and more demo-friendly than the more practical solution they showed on video that allowed a surgeon to manipulate charts without having to handle them physically. Why is that a big deal? No contact means no need to rescrub. I think we’re going to see some great things that are enabled because of this “toy” so stay tuned.

Afterwards it was time for a lot of walking. I met up with Jeff Guillet (@expta) to pick up our Springboard party passes (complete with the all-important green wristband for Mark Russinovich’s book Zero Day) and visit our seats in the Blogger Hub. the hub is a place with a dedicated seat, power outlets, and network connectivity for selected Microsoft-focused bloggers. Then it was a quick dash back to the dining hall for lunch with a co-worker, followed by another mad dash to the Expo Hall for the Twitter Army Tweetup coordinated by Rod Trent (aka @rodtrent).

My first session of the day was SIM201 “Wiretapping 101: Catching Evidence on the Network” with Laura Chappell. People had been tweeting about her quite a bit so I wanted to make sure I went to see what all the fuss was about. The hype was justified. I’ve used WireShark quite a bit, but only at a very superficial level. Laura showed how powerful a tool it can be if you know what you’re doing. I missed getting a copy of her toolkit before they ran out, but still feel like I can go back to the office and use WireShark to help identify security and performance issues. (I did manage to get a copy courtesy of @LjTx who found an extra one on the Expo floor.)

Next I headed to EXL326 “What’s New in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 SP2: Featuring GAL Segmentation” along with Jeff. Unfortunately the room was pack and the air conditioning wasn’t working so the room was like a sauna. Selecting a seat behind one of the projectors didn’t help either as the hot air jetted out the back. We toughed it out though. The main changes are the return of Outlook Mobile Access as OWA Mini, cross-site silent redirection OWA, and GAL Segmentation. I was always a fan of OMA, so glad to see OWA Mini. MS brought it back for markets where browser phones are still popular like Japan. Works great, even on a desktop PC browser, when you’re in a hurry. As far as GAL Segmentation, there are too many caveats to really make it feature for most people. For example, it does not work with Outlook for Mac or Entourage. That’s a showstopper right off the bat for my environment. For more details about SP2, see the Exchange Team blog.

I skipped the next session in order to go back to the hotel and freshen up for the Vendor Reception at the Expo. A quick shower and change into shorts made me feel like a new man.  The Expo Reception was as it usually is.  The food was mediocre so didn’t eat much before setting off on a swag hunt with Jeff.  After the Expo closed it was back to the hotel to drop off the bag and then head over to Der Biergarten for another evening with the Krewe.  Trying to pace myself, I turned in early that night, getting back to the hotel before midnight (although I wound up staying up another hour or so working on the blog).

If you drop any dev-related sessions, that still leaves a long list of products… Windows Client, Windows Server, Exchange, Lync, System Center (itself a long list of products), Forefront (a list of products that keeps getting longer), plus a little Windows Phone. I work with all of these, so which to pick?

This year System Center and Lync will probably occupy my attention the most.I’m especially looking forward to learning more about the 2012 versions of products like Configuration Manager (SCCM) and Data Protection Manager (DPM) and others. We’ve also just recently deployed Forefront Endpoint Protection and are looking at Threat Management Gateway (TMG) and Unified Access Gateway (UAG). TMG is a given as we have ISA 2006 in production and I really want to get that upgraded.

A Lync upgrade to our OCS environment (very small, no voice) is in our future as well, so will be good to chat with folks using it now who went through the upgrade.Voice is handled centrally at Washington University and that group is looking at Cisco’s VOIP solution, so we need to get a sense for how they might integrate.

A little MDOP, a little App-V, and I’ll call it a successful TechEd. How about you? What are you focusing on this year?

This will be my ninth TechEd. Dallas in 2003 was my first, and I haven’t missed one yet. If you’re an IT Pro in a Microsoft shop as I am, there is no better place to be if you want to stay current with Microsoft, its products, and the community. Every year I come back with new ideas and insights into our operations at work that I can use to make improvements and offer our users capabilities. The only limiting factor is the resources available back at the office to make these things happen. Not sure how it is where you work, but I have a feeling you understand inadequate budgets and being understaffed.

I’m especially looking forward to getting together with friends from previous TechEds, especially The Krewe. If you’re going to TechEd and you haven’t heard of The Krewe, you must not be online much. Do a search on the hashtag #TheKrewe and you’ll start to understand. Want to have fun while at TechEd? Want to find out where the parties are? Want to expand your network with smart and sociable people? Get to know The Krewe. Plus we’re bringing the mustaches. #stacheapalooza ‘nuff said.

While this change probably affects a small portion of the TechEd attendee audience, it was a significant discount for those of us who work or teach at universities.  For us, the cost to register was only $995. That kind of price goes a long way towards convincing your manager to send you to TechEd.  I work for a private university so technically we don’t fall under public sector rules for things like prize drawings and product giveaways, but I imagine trying to track who is public and who is private isn’t worth the trouble for a conference.

Microsoft is helping to make it easier for students to attend TechEd however. They have a limited number of student passes available at the US $995 price. Details should be available on the registration page later today.

If you’re planning to attend TechEd this year, but have not registered yet, don’t forget about the early-bird discounts that are available to everyone. You can save $300 by registering  before December 31. If you miss that deadline, the discount drops to $200 as long as you register before February 28. Don’t forget to follow @teched_na on Twitter for all the latest news about TechEd 2011.

Here’s what I collected on Day 4:

• Screaming Pig – Microsoft SilverLight

My first session was “SIA309 – Secure Endpoint – What’s in Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010” up in 388. We’ve been using Forefront Client Security for quite a while, and I was interested to find out some more details about the much delayed replacement. I came away pretty excited and eager to get my hands on the early bits. The addition of CPU throttling is a big win, as we often receive complaints from our users that FCS has started a scan and is impacting performance right when they need to get something ready for class. The addition of “sequencing” to its behavioral analysis will help catch things that are getting past FCS today. While individual events may look safe to the scanner, by looking at the events as a sequence, the combination of events can indicate a malware attack.

Forefront Endpoint Protection will also be better able to access updates as needed and automatically upload malware samples. The Dynamic Signature Service will go a long way towards shortening the cycle between new variants of malware and the release of updated signatures. Lastly, Dynamic Translation is a new feature that translates code from accessing actual resources to only using virtual resources, allowing Forefront to keep your system safe while it analyzes the behavior of the software it is scanning.

Next it was on to more Forefront family content in “SIA325 – Secure Endpoint: Virtualizing Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway.” This session was heavy on PerfMon analysis to monitor the load on your TMG server to determine whether virtualization will work. They showed an interesting table that listed each feature of TMG and the relative CPU and I/O hits from each one. Malware scanning was far and away the biggest impact on the system which is why they recommend placing the volume used for scanning on its own LUN and away from other activity. I have a feeling that our load would be well-suited to virtualizing, but I’ll need to look into it some more when I have time (as if that will ever happen!). The presenter offered to provide the data and PerfMon settings from the presentation, so I stopped by the booth and had it copied to my thumb drive.

I asked (at the booth, not during the session) whether they had considered adding multiple scanning engines in TMB, and he said that they had, but they didn’t feel the performance impact justified the benefits of the additional engines.

I ran into the guys from Med School so I had lunch with them (and apparently missed quite the discussion over at the Krewe table) before heading off to a meeting with @TechEd_NA, @expta, and @thekrewe. We had an interesting conversation about the event in general, the value of community at TechEd, and the phenomena that is The Krewe.

After the discussions, most of us were going to go to the Russinovich session, so we hung out for a while before heading down to the Auditorium. Even though we had met earlier in the week, @TiffanyWI hadn’t connected that I was @Ladewig until we were standing there waiting around. Since I use my last name for my Twitter name, anyone who looked at my badge knew right away who I was on Twitter. So that earned me a big hug and added another person to a growing list of friends thanks to Twitter, TechEd, and the Krewe.

Anticipating a packed house for “WCL315 – The Case of the Unexplained, 2010: Troubleshooting with Mark Russinovich”, we headed down to Auditorium B early. That turned out to be a good decision because we managed to be near the front of the line and secured decent seats once the room opened. Mark was in great form as always as he walked us through a number of puzzling problems. As he showed us how to use several Sysinternals tools to identify the causes of the problems, he managed to get in a number of digs at Microsoft, Outlook, and Google. How does a guy get to be that funny and so wicked smart? If you haven’t been to one of his sessions, make an effort to do so the next time you’re at a conference where he is presenting. Absolutely amazing!

With our brains just a little bit more full than before, it was time for everyone to leave the Convention Center for the last time and say good bye to the educational part of TechEd for 2010. I headed back to the hotel, changed clothes, and killed some time before heading down to the lobby to catch the bus to the Closing Party.

The Closing Party (used to be the Attendee Party in previous years) was at Blaine Kern’s Mardi Gras World. This place is a little bit hard to describe. Blaine Kern Studios creates floats, sculptures, and props, and entire parades for Mardi Gras, Universal Studios, and other locations around the world. Mardi Gras World encompasses the actual sculpture and prop studios where they do their work with huge and unique event spaces. Check out their web site to learn more.

I arrived at the party just before the doors opened, so I was one of the first people in. At first you walked into a huge warehouse between rows of sculptures from various floats and then past entire floats from which costumed people were throwing beads. I collected several, enough to make myself look festive, and then walked through the area and the out into the open space along the river. Here they had a number of tents setup with food stations. A little bit of this and a little bit of that, and I had had enough food to tide me over for the evening. As it was still quite warm outside, I moved into the indoor area and found @TiffanyWI and then @wcaubrey. The band from the opening Keynote, Rockin’ Dopsie, Jr. and the Zydeco Twisters, was playing there, so we found a table for us and @expta. At the same time, the rest of the Krewe were securing tables in the Grand Oaks Mansion area, so we eventually moved over there where it was a bit cooler and a little more relaxed.

If you’ve ever been to the Blue Bayou at Disneyland, the Grand Oaks Mansion area is very similar with a replica antebellum mansion under a night sky with walkways and courtyards under moss-draped trees. Very cool. We managed to carve out our own area and spent the rest of the evening hanging out and enjoying everyone’s company on our last night together listening to a Dixieland-style band play.

After a lot of photos, hugs, and promises to stay in touch, people started to disperse. I left around 11 PM and headed back to the hotel. It was pretty late as usual, so I decided to save the packing for the morning and get some sleep.

Here’s what I collected on Day 3:

That’s correct… Absolutely Nothing!

This is the first time in many years that I didn’t visit the Expo and didn’t come back with some swag.