Photos from “Vista Nuggets” session.

For the CompletePC image backup demo, the presenter asked an attendee to break his hard drive. Which he did. Then in about 30 minutes, he restored his entire volume. This was made possible by the hybrid incremental/image backup solution in CompletePC. One first backup, it takes an image of your entire volume. Then at every update, it uses Volume Shadow Copy to create a record of all the updates to each block on the drive, not files. And because it tracks drive block changes, and not the file system, it is more comprehensive and much faster. He was able to make an incremental update in only second, and restore that system in under an hour.

There was also another speech recognition demo. It went flawless. The presenter had a USB microphone which he could mute, so that helped. I think he was also using a new build, with a new wallpaper it seems.

Of course no Microsoft party is complete without XBOX demo machines and novelty XBOX case mods.

Steve Riley

http://blogs.technet.com/steriley/
I had a chance to attend one of Steve Riley’s sessions today and it as one of the best presentations I’ve seen. Steve Riley is a security expert at Microsoft and has been involved in the work that has gone into BitLocker and other Vista’s under-the-hood security features. The content of Steve’s presentation was not all that out-of-this-world, but his personality and way of presentation was so captivating. He would not use the stage, instead he walks just over a metre infront of the first row of the audience. He would walk back and forth and often stopping infront of people, looking at them right in the eye and kept talking. Sometimes he’d even walk up half way the sidewalks to get closer to the people at the back. It sounds weird, but it felt like he wasn’t presenting to the audience, but more having a chat with the audience.

Watch a portion of Steve’s talk about Windows Vista integrity and security.

Frank Arrigo

http://blogs.msdn.com/frankarr/
Frank, the DPE group manager of Microsoft Australia, He hasn’t been on digg, techmeme or Wikipedia, but he sure knows how to communicate. One in every three persons at TechEd wants to talk to Frank, and Frank will always respond with their name (apart from it printed on their badge) and know what they do.

He can start a conversation with anyone and everyone, and make sense. He knows pretty much every field of work and research at Microsoft Australia and is passionate about every single one of them. He’s always relaxed, whether it is minutes before an unprepared presentation or the keynote, he makes it seem like he doesn’t even have to present at all.

He’s one of those people that you feel comfortable with whenever, wherever. And it’s fun working with him.

Keynote/Opening address

TechEd Day 2 started with a opening address/keynote by Anne Kirah, a Microsot anthropologist. The keynote was sort of a let down in terms of technology geekiness, there was no live demonstration or video of Windows Vista or Office 2007. But on the other hand, there was a good insight about how Microsoft cares about it customers, although she only focused on a small fraction of those customers.

She explained a story about how Microsoft invited a range of beta testers for Windows XP, including two elderlies above 75. She higlighted the misconceptions of a “user” and “information worker” as commonly labelled by developers, the real users are the people who may not be IT pros. The general consesus of the beta testers are IT pros, who may encounter bugs and difficulties and view them as hurdles instead of submitting bugs. So it was important to Microsoft to invite people who you would normally exclude from a beta. And that’s also why Microsoft needs anthropologists too.

Windows Vista performance enhancements

I attended a session on Windows Vista performance enhancements. Saw a demo of SuperFetch, ReadyBoost and prioritised I/O. There were live benchmarks on Windows Vista using a script, you could see the obvious time diffrence when you plug in the flash drive for ReadyBoost. With prioritized I/Os, you can actually run the search indexer and fragmenter while you’re working. Not only will it run in low CPU priority, it will also have low I/O priority to make sure it doesn’t affect your disk write/read performance.

SuperFetch is interesting because he explained how it worked. Not only is it an improved caching system, but it will also monitor your software usage (user, hour, day) to track patterns in your usage. Then it will proactively cache popular programs at bootup or resume from standby/hibernation. But this will all be running in low priority I/O to have no effects on performance if you need it.

Also, got a good screenshot of the RC1 build (5487.winmain.060726-1810) he was using.

Also, new Office 2007 splash screen?

Photos and overview of TechEd Australia Day 1 – Student Day.

Day 0 Preparations

Checking out the auditorium which I’ll be presenting at.

Windows Vista and Office 2007

At the Student Day presentation, there was a Windows Vista showcase by Jeff Alexander and Scott Savage. Interesting note, Jeff Alexander used build 5700 (5700.winmain.060810-1900) branched off from RC1. It ran a lot faster than July CTP Build 5472 and had a few UI improvements here and there. Jeff also said RC1 should be coming really soon.

My presentation went pretty well. Obviously I couldn’t take any pictures, but some others might have. Hope to see them soon! Thanks to Chris Boulton who took these photos for me.

Home entertainment

A home entertainment demo followed after lunch. There was a short talk about DirectX10, and it was confirmed again that the DirectX10 screenshots are real. Not only did I receive email confirmation from the Microsoft DirectX team, but these guys again confirmed these were real renders from DirectX10. There was also another comparison shot.

Hover over image to see comparison image.

Followed by an Intel presentation. Nothing too exciting. Something along the lines of “We bought out the Core 2 Duos. We totally own AMD.”

Behind the scenes “Speaker’s Preparation Room”. Everyone runs Vista and got a snapshot of the new coloured bootscreen for Vista 5700. Nothing new, except it’s got a green ticker bar.

Expo

Checking out the show before thousands and thousands of delegates storm in and ruin everything.

The “Welcome” sign was very interesting, it contained the names (I presume) of all the TechEd attendees who registered.

View plenty more photos at my TechEd 2006 photo set at Flickr.

Speedtest.net launched their new fancy bandwidth tester recently. They are now leading the industry in internet speeds testing with an interface that could also double as a racing-car cockpit. I gave it a test drive (pun intended) to see how my ISP is performing.

By adopting Senator Ted Steven‘s internet traffic measurement model, it looks like I could stream 10 movies across that internet, receiving enormous amounts of information, and won’t affect anyone else’s personal internet. But if I try to send the internet to someone else, they might literally get it tomorrow. Why? Not only because Ted Stevens doesn’t make sense, but because my upload is pathetic.

OptusNet and Bigpond listen up, there is more to the internet than 256kbits/s. Stop restricting your customers to only 25KB/s uploads, cause all those teens around the country are going to get very frustrated when they upload their 100MB videos to YouTube.

Disclaimer: The following post is based on pure speculation with historical references. It may or may not represent the final outcome of Windows Vista. I, and many, pray it is.

Brandon LeBlanc (Sidebar Geek) writes about his high expectations for Windows Vista, and how Vista RC1 might fail to meet that expectation. So is Windows Vista going to be a flop like Windows Me?

I don’t think so. And here’s why.

(Credit: All images comes from Paul Thurrott’s Winsupersite)

You’re thinking, “well, these are all concept screenshots back from the Longhorn days.” And you’re right, all of them were (fairly) cool Photoshop screen-mockups or Macromedia Director demonstrations shown during WinHec/PDC 2003, 2004 or 2005. But there’s an important point to remember here, that all of these concepts were made by Microsoft, made by the Microsoft Design team, and made by the same people who are now designing Windows Vista. I’m going to let you think about that for a few seconds. *thinking music*

*Ding* If they can make concepts that look pretty cool, then why can’t they make the real thing look pretty cool? Sure there are technical limitations when you bring a Photoshop or Director concept into a real Win32 application, but they know at least what works and what doesn’t.

Brandon talks about inconsistent UI styles in the default Vista applications, and probably anyone who uses the current betas would find them disgusting, so there must be something going on. If the Microsoft design team find the styles disgusting too, and hasn’t changed them in the past 10 beta builds, then there can only be two explanations. They either don’t really give a damn or are working on a big visual update (not Aero Diamond). From the feel of their attention to detail in the concept screenshots, it must be the latter.

If you remember from a few months back, they’ve even got Robert Fripp to compose the ‘soundtrack’ to Windows Vista. That’s attention to detail. Sure, they’re probably wasting a lot of money just to compose some startup sounds, but if that’s their goal to create such a unique and perfect experience, you can’t help think that they’re not only focusing on the sounds.

My guess is, a highly polished and consistent version of Aero Glass is in the works. It may or may not make an appearance in RC1.