Interesting announcements during TechEd North America 2014

I don’t know if you have noticed but we are this week hosting our TechEd North America 2014 event in Houston, Texas.

TechEd North America is Microsoft’s premier technology conference for IT Professionals and Enterprise Developers, providing the technical education, product evaluation, and community resources to plan, architect, deploy, manage and secure a connected enterprise.

While not being present on TechEd I tried to follow some of the interesting announcements made. These are the ones I found most interesting.

Operations Manager Announcements:

• Microsoft System Center Advisor – Limited Public Preview.
  System Center Advisor is an online service that analyzes installations of Microsoft server software. Advisor collects data from your installations, analyzes it, and generates alerts that identify potential issues (such as missing security patches) or deviations from identified best practices with regard to configuration and usage. Advisor also provides both current and historical views of the configuration of servers in your environment.

  This new preview we are introducing an new Dashboard based on HTML5 and we introduce Intelligence Packs. We even have a gallery which contains these “intelligence packs” which contain rich knowledge and visualizations for capacity planning, security, diagnostics, and configuration assessment.

  System Center Advisor – Limited Preview gathers data from your on-premise installation and provides rich intelligence. There is no hardware, software, or applications to install, manage or upgrade – everything is cloud-based.

Sign up here: https://preview.systemcenteradvisor.com/

Azure Announcements:

• Virtual Machines: Integrated Security Extensions including Built-in Anti-Virus Support and Support for Capturing VM images in the portal

• Networking: ExpressRoute General Availability, Multiple Site-to-Site VPNs, VNET-to-VNET Secure Connectivity, Reserved IPs, Internal Load Balancing

• Storage: General Availability of Import/Export service and preview of new SMB file sharing support

• Remote App: Public preview of Remote App Service – run client apps in the cloud

• API Management: Preview of the new Azure API Management Service

• Hybrid Connections: Easily integrate Azure Web Sites and Mobile Services with on-premises data+apps (free tier included)

• Cache: Preview of new Redis Cache Service

• Store: Support for Enterprise Agreement customers and channel partners

  You can read more on Scott Guthrie’s blog here: https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2014/05/12/azure-vm-security-extensions-expressroute-ga-reserved-ips-internal-load-balancing-multi-site-to-site-vpns-storage-import-export-ga-new-smb-file-service-api-management-hybrid-connection-service-redis-cache-remote-apps-and-more.aspx

PowerShell Announcements:

• Windows Management Framework 5.0 Preview May 2014 is now available
  This version of the preview includes everything in the Windows Management Framework 5.0 Preview that was released in April of 2014 and a new module called PowerShellGet.

This new package installs exclusively on Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2. 

PowerShellGet is a new way to discover, install, and update PowerShell Modules.

If you have not yet downloaded or installed WMF 5.0 Preview May 2014 you should do it now.

I already downloaded and installed the preview and it’s so cool to be able to discover and install new PowerShell modules.

And while this was not an official announcement Jeffrey Snover introduced PowerShell DSC for Linux.

How cool is this?

In case you missed some of the interesting new from TechEd I suggest you go to our Channel 9 video channel and start watching some of the great sessions.

I already suggest you watch the following sessions on Channel 9:

Windows PowerShell Unplugged with Jeffrey Snover

Come learn PowerShell the way PowerShell was meant to be learned—exploring Windows from the console. In this session, Distinguished Engineer Jeffrey Snover starts with the Get-Help cmdlet and shows you the tools and techniques to teach yourself PowerShell. Jeffrey’s contention is that most people still haven’t realized the power of what was delivered in PowerShell V1 so advanced users are likely to learn as much as day zero beginners.

Channel 9 Live: Windows Azure Pack Automation

Symon Perriman with Charles Joy

Channel 9 Live: The Differentiated IT Professional

Rick Claus with Jeffrey Snover, Distinguished Engineer

Channel 9 Live: Microsoft Azure with Mark Russinovich

Rick Claus with Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow.

Windows PowerShell Best Practices and Patterns: Time to Get Serious

Based on results from the 2013 Scripting Games and a summer-long community engagement, this session presents the practices and patterns that the Windows PowerShell community has identified as the most important for creating stable, performant scripts and tools.

Let’s start with those first

Have fun!