Well, day three has come and gone. It has be a fantastic ride. I’ve learned a lot and it has been a great ride.
I started my last day with Jeff Guillet (http://www.expta.com) and “Build a Super-Fast Lab Exchange Lab for under $2,000.” I took copious amounts of notes for this; so much information. For Jeff’s presentation, he had a system which he outlines in his own blog (http://www.expta.com/server). Jeff was very thorough in his talk. He went over the pieces and parts as well as buying resources and sites he liked and didn’t like. What memory he liked and why he liked it. I’m not going to regurgitate as I’m sure he has already talked about much of this on his own site (http://www.expta.com).
We also had some great discussions about setting up the environment and the tools he uses (I may see about tackling the setup using DSC). If you want to setup your own environment I’m going to suggest hitting his site for all the info you’ll need. I think of all the presentations I’ve been to this is probably the one I’m most interested in getting started with.
Next I went to “Rock your .NET coding” with David McCarter (http://www.dotnettips.com). Now, this presentation was a bit out of my league as I’m not a professional developer. I do however write a lot of PowerShell code and I’m always trying to improve my code. Therefore a presentation on standards is a great place to go. While much of what was discussed is not directly applicable to me, it does make me think a bit harder about the code I do write, and that is not a bad thing. I will say, if you are a professional coder, you should take a look at Dave’s books and dvds. There was room full of professional developers there and I feel like he stumped a lot of them with his examples. Proof positive that we can all learn more.
Next I went to “Building Custom tools Using PowerShell” by Kaido Jarvemets and Greg Ramsey. a good portion of this presentation was based around Configuration Manager which, unfortunately, was not mentioned in the description. That being said there was some great topics being discussed. Adding right-clicking capabilities to Configuration Manager which calls PowerShell scripts, Utilizing WPF to easily generate PowerShell GUIs, great for the not-so-PowerShell-Friendly-Admin. Lastly they talked about WMI events and creating actions based on those events (send an email, log the event…). I’ll probably need to go over this stuff myself as some pieces went very fast.
The last event was the most fun! “Ask the Exchange Experts” with a panel of Experts and some of the production team in the back of the room piping in as needed. Lots of questions and lots of level-headed answers. This was a lot of fun and I picked up a few things to think about.
And with that I have to say good-bye to IT/DEV Connections for 2014. I learned a lot of stuff that me and my company will be able to benefit from. I’m glad I did it. I wish I could do it more. In this industry you can never stop learning. Fortunately for me, I like the learning.
Thanks everyone and I hope to see you next year!
Gene