I thought the event was excellent. There was a little bit of drama by some people about the lack of an agenda before the event. We knew that \u201cBuild Windows<\/u>\u201d was going to be about Windows<\/u> 8. And we also knew that Microsoft wanted to keep as much of the Windows 8 announcements for this week to maximise their impact on the media. I think that worked \u2026 kind of. I didn\u2019t see the 6 o\u2019clock news, where I\u2019d expect to see a certain California based appliance company be mentioned on one of their launch days. But just about everyone I met of the 5,000 delegates seemed pretty excited. <\/p>\n
I thought the venue was good, the event was well organised, food\/drink was good, the crew managed to get 5,000 people fed without much in the way of queuing, and I can\u2019t complain about getting a UK\u00a3999 device with Windows 8 developer preview preloaded on it. <\/p>\n
The Sessions<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n The two keynotes were well thought out. Everyone I talked to thought that Steven Sinofsky did a good job. To be honest, I didn\u2019t notice the time go by.<\/p>\n Most of the speakers knew what they were presenting on. Was the content level 400? No \u2013 but I wouldn\u2019t expect that here; this was a place to kick things off. At ask the experts, two of the presenters gave me a good bit of time to answer my questions.<\/p>\n I had a small bit of concern that there wouldn\u2019t be much in the way of content for an IT Pro like myself. As it turned out, sessions for IT pros were in the minority (as expected for this event) but there were more sessions than I could attend. I\u2019ll be downloading some to watch on my slate PC on the way home.<\/p>\n What Stood Out?<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n I don\u2019t believe that Microsoft mentioned that Windows Server 8 is optimised for the cloud. They should have because it is I have said over and over that the Hyper-V group listen to feedback like no other, and we got further proof of that this week:<\/p>\n And let\u2019s not forget the innovation:<\/p>\n If day 2 seemed to be the private cloud\/Hyper-V day, then day 3 was the storage and failover clustering day. It is no secret that I hate Redirected IO and what it does to the backup and CSV design story in Hyper-V. That has been changed because we now have direct IO during CSV backup. That\u2019s all I needed to hear to make me happy. But no, we found out that storage would never be the same again with a new feature called Storage Pools, in which we could create highly available and scalable Storage Spaces. Combined with 10 GbE, NIC teaming, offloading, and RDMA, and SMB 2.2, we get very fast storage on file shares!!! It\u2019s simple, it\u2019s cheap, it makes clustering possible for the small business, and it makes storage more flexible for the large enterprise. Believe it or not, but the thing I most want to try out now is to create one of these active\/active clustered file shares on a Storage Spaces located CSV \u2013 that\u2019s a mouthful What\u2019s Next?<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n The developer preview release is an early pre-beta release aimed at the software developers and hardware manufacturers. It gives them a chance to start getting their products ready in time for RTM, if not earlier \u2013 it would be best to test on RC so a final product is ready on RTM day. But that isn\u2019t stopping us IT pros from starting to learn.<\/p>\n We can expect Microsoft to start revealing more information. We IT pros actually learned very little of the new OS this week. We heard nothing of Active Directory, security and identity, \u201cbetter together\u201d, OS deployment, and so on. There isn\u2019t a TechEd Europe this November\/December so I guess most of the announcements will either be online, at some other event (that I don\u2019t know of). <\/p>\n My money is on some kind of event\/announcement in January\/February 2012 where the complete feature set is detailed. <\/p>\n ARM devices were on display behind secure Perspex cases at Build. There is no public ARM build of Windows 8 so that will have to wait.<\/p>\n Until then, we finally have something to install, dig into, and learn about, and isn\u2019t that what the Build event was all about in the end?<\/p>\n It\u2019s Friday afternoon in Anaheim USA, I\u2019m sitting in my hotel room (jetlagged), and it\u2019s that time of the week when I have to look back on what\u2019s happened. First thing\u2019s first; how well did Build Windows go? The Event I thought the event was excellent. There was a little bit of drama by some … Continue reading “Build Windows 2011 Review”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[176,109],"class_list":["post-11806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","tag-eventnotes","tag-windows-8"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t![\"Winking](\"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/wlEmoticon-winkingsmile3.png\")
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