These are the sessions I attended today. I won’t bother giving a full summary here, since you can watch any of them on Channel9. This is just my personal opinion whether I can recommend watching the recordings of these talks or not.

Testing Un-testable Code with Fakes in Visual Studio 2012

Peter Provost

This session covered some advanced unit testing topics in VS2012 and the title really kept it’s promise. With the RC of VS2012 the ability to generate stubs and shims for arbitrary assemblies was introduced. With the help of this feature, the behavior of any property, method, or event of existing CLR class can be modified. This finally enables a testing technique known from other programming environments like JavaScript or Python.

A Modern Architecture Review: Using the New Code Review Tools

Adam Cogan

This session provided some best practices for doing code reviews, using code analysis tools, avoiding common errors, improving build and deployment processes and generally reaching maturity stage at agile practices. The advice and practices given where really down to earth, based on the speakers personal experience as scrum master and agile team lead, rather than announcing the agile utopia once more. Additionally, many practical examples were given, demonstrating different tools (Solution Architect, Resharper, …) on actual projects.

Case of the Unexplained 2012: Windows Troubleshooting with Mark Russinovich

Mark Russinovich

Once again “Mr. Sysinternals” at his best. His series of TechEd sessions culminated in this talk from his famous “Case of the Unexplained” series. As with his previous sessions, the rush of visitors was immense, forcing TechEd staff to open the balcony of the the “Theater” session hall. Maybe next time it could be worth considering reserving the keynote hall for Marks’s sessions. Content-wise, this session again met all expectations. In his usual entertaining, yet highly-informative presentation-style, Mark Russinovich went through a series of scenarios, in which Windows just did not act the way it was supposed to do. With the Sysinternals tools (MR: “I heard, the guy who wrote this tools is a really, really smart person”) he pointed out the various constellations that caused the undesired behaviors and how to sort them out. This session truly was one of my personal TechEd highlights and it does not leave much to say except:

“When in doubt, use process monitor”

IPv6: (Hard)Core Networking Services

Daniel Sörlöv

Although this being a level 4 session title “… (Hard)Core …”, this session started with a general introduction to IPv6 and explaining the basic concepts. This was actually a good thing, since IPv6 is a complicated matter and the more often the basic things are repeated the less complicated and scary this topic gets. The speaker covered many topics from a general IPv6 overview, to dual-stack scenarios, to basic security precautions one should take to defend oneself against the most common IPv6 based attacks. Once again (like Edward Horley in his session) he pointed out that these precautions are absolutely necessary, since IPv6 is already there, even if we don’t use it. In modern operating systems since Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 IPv6 is:

• On by default!
• Used first!
• Cannot be fully removed!

All in all, a very informative session which was also the last one in this year’s TechEd Europe.