Microsoft TechDays 2015

Today I took a day off to attend the Microsoft TechDays 2015 in Hong Kong. It is a three-day event. I wish I could be there for the next 2 days but I got an appointment with a hospital tomorrow (Wish me luck).

The confirmation email said the registration started at 9:00am, whereas the first session started at 9:30am. So I arrived at the HKCEC at 9:15am , hoping there would be less people in the line for registration, but I was definitely wrong. I had no idea there would so many people coming to this event, talking about a Wednesday which everybody had to work. I managed to do my registration and get the wristlet at 9:35am, then I rushed to the room upstairs where a guy called Michael Niehaus, who is a senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, would be talking about the deployment of Windows 10. Throughout the talk he shown us how current Windows users could upgrade existing devices using a simple in-place upgrade process and provisioning tools for transforming new devices into ones ready for enterprise use. The whole idea was revolved around the enterprise level, so what the whole talk was beyond doubt too much for a normal user like me. Still, I found it fascinating that they did not just stick with the old wipe-and-load approach for upgrades.

The queue was really long!

The wristlet I got.

Then I hung around the corridors to check out the company booths, seriously I didn't really know what all those companies were doing. And in fact, those people were aiming for people who sort of represented their own companies. And I looked too young and dressed too casual to be looked like someone important, so they couldn't care less about me. Still, a lady fell for it and asked me to fill a form so she could contact my "company" on some employee training service(?), so I filled a bunch of true but useless information in order to get this notebook as a gift.

The next talk I attended to sounded a bit technical, which was called "DevOps: Getting Started with Application Insights", the speaker was Vitaly Gorbenko. The slides he prepared were pretty good, Long story short, he was trying to explain/promote a software service named Application Insight. It provides in-depth information like global availability and performance, customer usage, and deep diagnostic information so you could evaluate and monitor the application you are developing on different levels,

In the afternoon, I finally got out and had a break. After a delicious McDonald's meal, I went back to the HKCEC and listened to another talk about the management of Windows 10, by the same speaker earlier (Michael Niehaus). The session was mainly about enhancements to built-in mobile device management protocols, new Windows Store and volume purchase program capabilities, sign-on capabilities with organizational IDs (Azure AD), sideloading and other app deployment enhancements, and new capabilities being added to other existing management technologies like PowerShell and WMI. I didn't get to finish the whole talk as I got a phone call from the hospital.

Finally it was the keynote session in which Microsoft was gonna introduce their latest development and technology. Here are some highlights:

What a big turn out!

We were asked to try the Bing Pulse Beta.

The QR code led our phones/tablets to a page like this, and we got to vote!

The speaker upstairs then raised a poll question and asked us to vote.

And they shown the result in real time!

Then the general manager of Hong Kong Microsoft gave a speech about Microsoft's vision and objective, mainly about how they are trying to let us do anything whenever we want, instead of being stuck by what kind of devices we are using.

Then there was an introduction regarding Office365. For instance, they finally can let different people edit a document at the same time, like Google Doc.

They had also demonstrated a new feature of Skype: translating the language you speak from English to Mandarin and vice versa. That was really amazing!

Next, they demonstrated how convenient using Azure could be. For instance, this photo shows one can control a farm through the internet, like turning on and off the fans, etc.