Irina Ivanova About Software Testing: Microsoft TechDay Estonia 2014

I visited Microsoft TechDay Estonia conference for the second time. And last year I liked better, than this year.

Two complaints about organization:
1. There was 5 tracks and usually talks about similar topics are in one track. This year they put 2 security talks to parallel tracks, so I had to choose between them.
2. The language of the talk was not specified in the program. Some talks were in English and some in Estonian. For me it's not a problem, but there were people who doesn't talk in Estonian and they couldn't plan their program because of this.

Opening video speech by Rain Laane (Microsoft Baltics region manager)

All pictures are taken from TechDay Estonia OneDrive album
Standard general speech, but I wanted to mention about it only because of one quote, that I heard there. The idea of the speech was that they showed a bunch of kinds in the meeting room, who are tend to be mobile experts and talked what they like about mobile and cloud. And one girl said, that she likes to draw on computer, because it is easier to erase things there. And that sentence is some kind of bias: on the one hand, how can you like to draw if you like to erase on the first place; on the other hand, the erasing is the essential part of the creating.

Opening speech by Symon Perriman (Senior Technical Evangelist, Microsoft)

Perriman said a lot of suspicious things. For example, he said that Microsoft is very passionate about cloud technology and before they make some product they think first how it would work with cloud. I am not sure that it's advantage – not all products should work with cloud and this one-side approach may kill some good ideas.

Symon Perriman said, that some other guy said, that every single company is now software company, because all have their pages and provide services through internet. I can't agree with this – every single company is also cleaning their offices every day, that doesn't mean that they are cleaning companies. Software is just a tool to achieve some goal and goal is what makes the company, not tools. If hotel have rooms reservation system most likely it just bought or ordered this system from so called "software company" and that doesn't make the hotel "software company" itself.

Also he showed some new functionality of Windows 10 and there was a moment where he called 3 available options of frequency (5 sec, 5 min, 15 min) "a lot of flexibility".

Opening speech by Simon May (Enterprise Device Infrastructuralist, Microsoft)

Simon May was mainly talking about Windows 10. The purpose of it – one platform for all devices (notebooks, smartphones, xbox, tablets...), which is pretty nice. Also Microsoft do software for competitor's devices such as iPads and iPhones (for example, Office for iPad), which is also nice.

The Microsoft Web Platform – Today and Tomorrow by Jon Galloway (Technical Evangelist, Microsoft)

Jon Galloway showed some interesting features in Visual Studio. I don't use Visual Studio, but it was quite interesting for me – looks like ASP.NET programmers are pretty lucky.

Crash Course to the Magic of Universal Apps by Iris Classon (Software Developer, In Love With Code)

I didn't like it. It supposed to be technical talk in developers track, but it was very general and without any interesting
specific new information.

Windows PCs Can Be Hacked! It's Time to Use Bitlocker by Heiki Tähis (Windows Expert - IT Pro MVP)

It was very interesting talk about platform security itself and with specific hacks that you can try at home. Some point from this talk:

There isn't any reason why user should have administrator's account in Windows.
If user have administrator's account in Windows there is no way to secure data on this computer.
If you need to steal data from hard drive, but you don't know Windows username's password you can just physically attach hard drive to your computer, where you have username.
With Bitlocker it is possible to encrypt only taken space, but in free space are located deleted files.
In most cases TPM (Trusted Platform Module) is enough to secure your data.

Any Size of Data Visualization with Power BI by Henn Sarv (Technical lector, trainer, consultant)

Very interesting talk. Henn Sarv showed how you can make beautiful and dynamical diagrams and graphs with Office tools (mostly with Excel), how you can visualize a big amount of data, how you can import and analyze data from your Facebook (about your friends, for example) etc.
After this talk I updated my Office (from 2010 version) to try all these features that Henn Sarv showed.

Unknown talk about Office 365 by unknown speaker (replaced talk)

Too general. I had the impression, that speaker is trying to sell me some product, which he is not using by himself. I din't learn anything new about Office – just pretty presentation about nothing.

Security and Microsoft Azure Iaas by Tarmo Tikerpäe (SSP Datacenter at Microsoft)

I liked it. Speaker was talking about backstage things. One thing that I want to mention from this talk – Tarmo Tikerpäe told, that usually Microsoft doesn't have direct access to your data. They get access only if you have some incident and ask them to resolve it.

Sponsors' Boxes

I am on the rightSponsors and their boxes are mostly the same as in previous year (even located at the same corners). I liked Microsoft box the most, where I tried tablets and different devices for them (such as covers with keyboards).