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.

Building Awesome Metro style HTML apps in Blend

Kirupa Chinnathambi

This session really met my expectations. It gave a good overview about building HTML Metro apps, from a beginner’s point of view, but targeted for people who worked with Expression Blend before. The session’s content was very well structured and the speaker demonstrated good didactical skills using a consistent non-trivial sample application for conveying the key concepts. Although I will probably stick to C# and .NET for developing Metro style apps, my “developer horizon” got broadened again this morning – which is a good thing.

Windows Azure Internals

Mark Russinovich

That session I was really looking forward to - Mark Russinovich explaining all the nitty-gritty detail happening under the hood of Windows Azure. What happens during provisioning of Azure instances and which components are involved? How do Azure applications (the roles) get updated? How does the Fabric Controller work? All these questions got answered in this session in a really detailed and transparent way. An absolute highlight was the recap of the events that lead to Azure’s infamous “leap day outage” and how basically one line of code triggered this series of unfaithful events.

Going Beyond F11: Debug Better and Faster with Visual Studio 2012

Brian Randell

This session provided a good and complete overview of Visual Studio’s debugging capabilities. Nothing really new there, but the presentation skills of Brian Randell made this session a real pleasure and absolutely worth attending it. Additionally, this session offered two key take-aways for me:

1. Microsoft fixed Remote Debugging in VS2012 and it finally works in an out-of-the-box experience (this was necessary because of the necessity of debugging Metro applications on ARM / WinRT devices.
2. IntelliTrace works just create. I really have to start using it – I actually have no idea and no excuse either why I don’t use already.

Malware Hunting with the Sysinternals Tools

Mark Russinovich

Another great session by “Mr. Sysinternals”, in which he was actually using and demonstrating his tools to give a recipe of how to discover and eliminate malware on one’s PC – or more likely on a friend’s or relative’s ;-)

In this both highly interesting and entertaining sessions Mark Russinovich demonstrated malware removal beginning with simple examples up to highly complex ones like StuxNet on actual infected PC systems.

Building Windows 8 Metro Style Apps With C++

Steve Texeira

Following along an actual demo application, Steve Texeira gave a good overview of the steps involved in creating a new C++ application targeting the Metro SDK. Unfortunately, the first part of the session was mainly a recap of the talk he had given the day before. So no big news here, but all in all a solid and well-presented session.