From the Editor

Orlando is not the only place for a conference, you know. We’re just back from Microsoft Tech•Ed in Boston, and let’s just say that it was an absolute pleasure to be in a city where you can take the train to the convention center.

And what a great convention center it is! It’s a brand-new facility in South Boston, and it’s beautiful. The expo hall was as vast as any I can remember, and I go back to the first Tech•Ed in 1992. Of course, feeding over 10,000 hungry geeks is a challenge in and of itself, so perhaps the organizers can be excused for making those flower-shaped hamburgers on Wednesday.

The big buzz at the show this year centered around both Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and it grew steadily throughout the week. Attendees received the Beta 2 bits of both products. I had already taken the plunge with Windows Vista Beta 2, which has a new Windows Media Player sharing component. As others in the hotel started to play with their CDs, I kept getting notifications that new machines were available for me to share my library with. Judging from this empirical evidence, adoption was brisk in the downtown Sheraton Hotel.

So, you say, what’s it like entrusting your work machine with a beta OS? As you’d expect, some of the features work flawlessly while others are still undergoing fine-tuning. The security in Windows Vista has been cranked up to 11, and it will be a lot harder to accidentally toast your machine. This should be good news for desktop admins out there who spend their days degunking machines assigned to employees who have unwittingly snuck malware past the firewall.

TechNet Magazine also had a great week in Boston. While other booths were giving away squeezy balls, or USB dongles or, if you were lucky, pens bearing logos, we went for broke and gave away an Xbox 360 every day of the show to a lucky reader/attendee who answered a couple of questions correctly. The hordes grew daily—until the booth looked like U2 was about to play on the rooftop or something. Who knew that going monthly could be this exciting?

What if you couldn’t make it to Boston this year—are you out of luck? Not by a long shot! You may have missed out on the Xbox, but you don’t have to miss the rest of the show. Visit TechEd 2006 to watch webcasts of the keynote address and the conference sessions. Check out VirtualTechEd.com to view breakout sessions, demos, as well as news and interviews from the show. Finally, if you don’t want to miss a thing, order the DVDs.

Closer to home, the man behind TechNet Magazine, the guy who puts our content together, Joshua Hoffman, is about to get married. By the time you read this, he will have wed his fiancée Jaclyn, and will be off honeymooning in Europe. We wanted to put a little photo in, but the words "not happening" kept being tossed around the office, so instead we’ll have to settle for the photo of the crowds at our Xbox drawing. We wish Josh and Jaclyn the best of luck; if you’d like to do the same, you can send them best wishes at nuptials@microsoft.com. —J.T.

Thank you to the following Microsoft technical experts: Jason Buffington, Thomas Deml, Paul Donlan, George Holman, Jesper Johansson, Paul Jones, Ayla Kol, Paul Leach, Jon Markarian, Michael Murgolo, Frank Oliver, Steve Riley, Tali Roth, and Liqiang (Larry) Zhu.

© 2008 Microsoft Corporation and CMP Media, LLC. All rights reserved; reproduction in part or in whole without permission is prohibited.