We’re a little over half-way through TechEd 2013. With hundreds of sessions already in the books, I asked conference attendees who were standing in the hours-long line waiting to purchase a highly discounted Surface, “What’s the most interesting thing you’ve heard or learned so far?”
I just went to a session on becoming an Office “ninja” and that was awesome, tons of cool new tips for Office 2013. And I’ve even been using 2013 for a while and didn’t know some of the stuff. It was great…The Word to PDF, you can take a PDF and open it up in Microsoft Word and it’s editable text with all the structure from the PDF.
–Ryan Max
There were a lot of interesting nuggets that came out of the keynote, the changes to Azure, the MSDN subscription changes for dev/test, I thought that was pretty cool…the cyber security stuff at these sessions were eye-opening for me.
–David Bachrach, Microsoft
Gosh, there’s been a few really interesting things. We just got out of session where they were talking about ASP.Net SignalR. We do a lot of work with real-time applications, so we have a flagship app we built for the Department of Transportation in Oregon, and that app has real-time screens that run in the operations centers that have to maintain their data. So if an operator in some region changes data the other region can immediately see that change. Traditionally we’ve used WCF, just a home-grown pub-sub model, so SignalR sounds like a really great technology we can use to get out of the game ourselves and be able to rely on the wonderful team at Microsoft to have them deal with the nitty-gritty, dirty work of keeping a connection open while still being able to keep that real-time data alive.
–Mark Clements, Oregon State University
Today that’s been the SignalR. It’s very cool and easy to write code for it. It scales like it’s supposed to, so they designed it well.
–Michael Riley, who works in precision farming in Ames, Iowa
The Server 2012 R2 stuff, the new storage stuff looks pretty impressive. I’m anxious to get my hands on that and try it out.
–Ryan Brown, BrightPlanIT
The integration between Yammer and how they’re integrating it with SharePoint.
–Mike Massoom, BrightPlanIT