Shut Up, Laura

So I usually try to blog "Live from Tech Ed!(tm)", but that really didn't happen this year. What with being quite seriously on-vacation since my last day with %Previous-Employer% was the Friday before and my first day with %New-Employer% is Monday, lugging the laptop around just didn't seem worth it.  That, and I'm stuck with M.'s old laptop with the British keyboard - the @ and the \ keys are in the wrong place, both of which are surprisingly important to an IT nerd.  :-)

Tech Ed 2008.  Awesome as always.  Hung out at the Identity & Access Management TLC, answering AD questions and soaking up information from JoeK and Matt Steele on the AD FS booth.  I think that the whole "Active Directory Domain Services" re-branding thing has people confused, as the following exchange was fairly common:

"What's Active Directory Domain Services?"

"It's Active Directory."

"Oh. Thanks!"

Beyond that there were a few "RODC 101" whiteboards that people seemed pleased by, design questions surrounding the eternal "What do I do about AD in the DMZ?" question, and a difference of opinion over the usefulness of Bitlocker on domain controllers, due in part (though not entirely) to the fact that nobody but nobody is shipping server motherboards with TPM chips at the moment.

And speaking of AD FS, I caught Matt Steele's AD FS Architecture deep-dive that I missed at DEC - hopefully it'll be made available online somewhere or he'll webcast it, as it really gave me a few *click* moments of "Oh, now I get it!" that I'd been heretofore lacking surrounding AD FS. Rounding out my sessions were my annual visits to Brian's "How MS IT does..." talks, informative and enjoyable as always.

So off to SEA I go next week to begin a new IdM adventure; more updates as events warrant.