Tech·Ed 2007 - Day 3: My First Session (Recap)

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Technically it is day 4 for me, but I had a little trouble posting yesterday evening since just about all the bandwidth in my hotel was consumed.  I ran the handy Speakeasy Speed Test a bunch of times and it was barely making it over 300 Kbps on the download side.

Wow!

It's slightly ironic since I presented on the topic of "Deploying High Performance and Scalable Networking with Windows Server 2008" earlier in the day.  BTW, thanks to everyone who attended (nearly 460 people) and for the great evaluation feedback.  Before I get to the feedback, here are a few tidbits on what I presented:

I started off with a little quiz for the audience. I flashed on the screen a photo that my wife recently took of a sandwich board sign that sits in front of the local downtown Ramada hotel in Seattle.  See if you can workout what's the weird bit about this sign, I'll give you 30 seconds:

All_Day_Breakfast

Well?

Nice job! 

As you can see Max's restaurant may boast both the best breakfast in Seattle and that it is available all day long, but only between the hours of their operation (which happens to be 7a until 130p). 

After that little bit of fun, I dove into my session which discussed our new TCP/IP stack in Windows Server 2008 (and Windows Vista), with a specific focus on the features that help improve performance and scalability.  This included:

  • TCP Receive Windows Auto-Scaling
  • Compound TCP (CTCP)
  • Wireless improvements
  • Hardware offload and acceleration
  • Policy-based Quality of Service (QoS)
  • IPv6 (yup)

We had a good bunch of questions both during and after the session.  And, if you didn't attend TechEd 2007, I'm happy to send you copy of the deck.

I did run a little over time, but the majority of the attendees were good sports and stayed as I rapidly finished up that last few slides.

Here are some the comments from attendees (thanks!):

"Excellent Presentation: I really benifited [sic] technically by attending this session! Great information, I can tell that the presenter put alot [sic] of time into preparing this session!"

"Ian ROCKED! It is difficult to get people excited about a network stack but he did it. I was hoping for more demos but the data/tests he discussed did include real-world info and that was good."

"Ian's session was enjoyable. He made it interesting and kept the presentation going at a fast pace. He had a way of taking highly technical designs and statistics and simplifying them so we could understand the benefits. He went over by 10 minutes and almost everyone stayed in the room waiting for him to finish. Thanks Ian."

"A lot of information to go over in a short amount of time."

There was also some good constructive feedback on the need for some more demos, a different description for the session, and improving the room layout.  Thanks for that feedback!  It really helps me do a better job with my future presentations (which one of mine is about to start!).