We arrived in Paris after a long wait at the Stockholm airport. The flight didn't leave till 7pm so we had the day to Sighsee? No, Sleep in? no - you guessed it - EMAIL!

We landed in Paris and took a 45 minute taxi ride to the hotel. Nice hotel in the Opera district. I think I saw a hint of Paris along the way but not really much. Isaac and I met with Olga Londer at 11:30pm and I went to be at 3am - got up at 7:30 for breakfast and another presentation.

Isaac is wrapping up now and we're headed out to the airport. Olga has some plan in mind to shuttle us to a train and see something of Paris before leaving. Not much but better than nothing.

Flying to Florence tonight, then up again for another show.

Must    sleep     soon.

-brett

Had a great day doing the tourist thing. Isaac and I took a bus/boat tour to see this really amazing city. Of course, I hear that for 7-8 months you only get about 7 hours of sunlight and it's cooler, so today in the 70's and bright sunlight - is Stockholm at it's best. There is lot going on here and people in general seem relaxed and healthy. http://www.stockholmtown.com/templates/substartpage____2405.aspx

We presented to a group of about 40 people and Isaac and I agreed it was the best presentation yet. I've settled into the rythme of the Security presentation which is my favorite topic and added some detail to the configuration talk that seems to put some pieces together that were missing overall. Funny how you have to do these things a few times to get them tuned up. When I was teaching IIS training before I joined Microsoft, I did the same course at least 20 times and then rewrote it to be more effective. I really like maturing content like that and try to the same for articles and such, providing there's time. That's one thing that bugs me about working on a continous stream of content related deadlines at Microsoft (or anywhere else), is that there is not usually the oppotunity to really evolve content to the next level. Like if you work on a class (such as MOC 2295a to which I was major contributor), you just don't get the opportunity to go back and reorganize to a higher level. So I'm enjoying the oppotunity to present the same content muliple times.

Now it's time for the spring to finish line. At 7 we take off of for Paris and present on Weds, then leave WEDS eve for Florence and present on Thurs, then leave bright and early Friday back to the states. Yikes! 

-brett

Getting up at 6am the next day, it's off to Stockholm. You can tell immediatly that we're back in Scandinavia as the design of the airport resembles Copenhagen and Amsterdam, all brushed steel, glass, and wooden floors. It looks sleek, but seems somewhat sterile to me after Warsaw. The ended quickly in the 30 minute drive to Stockholm featuring a very lush landscape.  It reminded me of Seattle in that way.

Stockholm is a throughly modern city. Arts, shops, pedestrain walkways, local resuarants and transit are all blended very well to create a very browseable experience. You can walk for a very long time and find a lot of interesting places. This is an area just outside the hotel in front of a theatre, bookstore, shopping complex. That's live theatre, not movies.

After a good nights sleep I'm feeling more or less adjusted to the time zone. Tomorrows a holiday in the US but and while our friends are taking the day off we're delivering the 3rd presentation of the tour. <sarcasm> Poor us, having to work on the holiday in Stockholm </sarcasm>. Will post more later!

-brett

I didn't know what to expect in Warsaw. We arrived still suffering from jet lag and glad to be checked into a really beautiful Marriot in the center of Warsaw. The view from my room was stunning.

We didn't have a lot of time. Walking around there are a great many things to see but I spend most of my time getting ready for the next day. We were going to be filmed and webcast throughout the day so presentations needed to be especially smooth.

We arrived at Microsoft Poland and met our host Jan Walkiewicz , shown here with Isaac.

I haven't seen the reviews yet, but I think the presentations went pretty well. Isaac was unhappy that one of his demos had a BSOD caused by a known issue with Virtual PC that may blue screen when running after after the OS goes to sleep on a laptop. He recovered gracefully, but still - that's high on the list of things you'd rather not have happen during a demo. Aside from that the audience of about 100 people seemed to be pretty happy.

 I know we felt pretty good with they way things went. If I find the links to the webcasts, I'll post them here.

Next stop - Stockholm.

We had good time presenting the wonders of IIS 7 to an astonished audience of about 34 people in Copenhagen. OK, perhaps astonished is a bit overdone, but they definitley liked what they saw in IIS 7. Very good questions from the audience which I am told is quite unusual for for a Danish audience, so that was seen as a sign of high interest. Unfortunately, we lost some time during the day due to a malfunction of the video projector at the facility hosting the event. The guys there tried to pawn if off on Vista. There was a time, about a year ago, when Vista didn't play well with some latopts and external monitor ports, but I've not had a problem like that in a long while. So we brought in another laptop and even an XP system, and no go on the projector. Eventually, the wheeled in another one but we lost about an hour overall Of course, that wasn't helping the mood of the audience. I did my best to talk through the overview without showing much,  picture/1K words, etc, so they got the 1K words version of most of the overview.

Oh by the way, to the one guy who was asking "If I have a 200 websites on a server and each has a 5 host headers, how do I find the site that has a specfiic host header", the answer is APPCMD list sites|findstr "host header you're looking for". Simple! Even so, I think it's a great idea to expose the host header info in the UI and will ask the IIS team to add that to the list of things to consider.

This morning, Isaac and I headed to the airport and now we're in Warsaw Poland. What a very intersting place! It would take a year to explore just the downtown center area we are in. It's a beautful day and it's only 1:50pm but I'm dog tired after only 4 hours sleep, again. Not quite adjusted to the 9 hours time difference from here to Seattle.

Anyway, we'er going to the Microsoft office at 5 to do a little rehearsal and then back the hotel for a looooong sleeeeep.  I hear we have 100 people signed up for the presentation tomorrow so really looking forward to it.

Later,

B

But what happened to Day 1? Heck if I know. Somewhere between take off and landing a lot of hours disappeared! We arrived in Copenhagen at 1pm yesterday. Found this sign hanging in the airport. Something you won't see in the US! Can I get a piece of this dollar drops action?

.

Certainly feels like the home of IKEA around here as the design is all very modern. I like modern, so all the glass, brushed steel, wood floors, and sleek lines look good to me. Here's a picture of my room. You can see the uber modern design. The steel tubes on the right and left have a motion sensor in them. When you stand up at night, a little light comes on at the base the illumates the floor.

S

Strong architecture and design is everywhere which is in stark contrast the very old buildings, chuches, and 6 story brick residendial buildings that line the streets. A odd mix visually. As you walk along the pedestrian malls (which are rambling outdoor shopping areas that are very popular), it's a distinctive mashup kind of experinece. As you walk, you'll pass by a local bakery followed by a lingerie store, next to a local bar, then Burger King, lingerie, Gucci, jamacian importsn, lingerie, then an Italian/Mexican restuarnt that you can't quite identify as an italian/mexican restaruant in any distinctive way.

Going to work on some demos for tomorrow's presentation. Will told me to brush up on the new FTP server as that was popular topic on his part of the tour.

More photos and trip reports to come.

Later,

Brett

So here are the dates, locations, registraion pages and speakers for the IIS7 EMEA roadshow. Some of the links might not be running yet, but this is what I have. We are putting the final touches on the presentations today and sending off Will and Rick tommorrow. Isaac and I leave the following week for Denmark and are really looking forward to it.

I know some of you may be asking "but what about <insert your country here>"? I am but a lowely speaker and my duties do not include such important tasks as choosing what locations to present at. That is evidently a complex task that falls to more capabale hands, thankfully, as I am terrible at this kind of task. Some countries do their events, others can't work with these dates, etc. etc. I can't believe that I finally get to go to Paris and I have 1 day, most of which is tied up in work! Arrrrgh. I am going to be in the city with Louvre and can't go! That is cruel and unusual punishment. Oh well. That's the price you pay sometimes to be an evangelist.

I'll be posting pictures, stories and other details as they occur.

Later.

Brett

I'm going on a roadtrip to Europe for two weeks to present a 1 day class on IIS 7! There are actually two teams of two and I'm on the 2nd team leaving in two weeks for two weeks. (see http://blogs.iis.net/rickjames/archive/2007/05/06/iis-7-talks-reykjavik-and-london.aspx). This is going to be fun! Or course, getting the content together is part of the gig and that's a challenge as I am really hard nosed about getting it right. My style is a lot more informational and less marketing focused than some would like, but my belief is that if have a good product, you don't need a lot of hype. And IIS 7 is a good product.

As I study some of the demos we're doing and talk to the IIS program mangers, I learn more about some of the stuff under the covers that isn't getting a lot of press. Security is one of those topics and as luck would have it, is my particular most interested topic. Imagine that.

Did you know that IIS 7 has built in a new feature called URL Authorization that allows you to restrict access to content without using file permissions? You can simply entire a rule in the UI or directly in the .config file that says deny user="Bob" and Bob will be denied access. The cool part of this is that if you copy the content to another server (and this feature is delegeated), then your security rules move with the content. Think about that for bit. No more managing NTFS permissions on a per sever basis. You could just assign permissions for the worker process identity to have access to the content (and maybe the IUSR account <maybe? Yes maybe. You can tell IIS 7 to use the worker process identity for anon access!).

This is huge and it works with any content, not just .NET.

Just one of the many new security features built into IIS7 we'll be showing on the roadshow. I'm so psyched about the new security improvements that I'll be posting some screencasts on channel 9. But hey, you don't need to wait. It's not a special builld or anything. URLAuthorizatin is in Beta 3 Just download beta3 and check it out for yourself!

http://www.iis.net/articles/view.aspx/Managing-IIS7/Configuring-Security/URL-Authorization/Understanding-IIS7-URL-Authorization?tabid=1

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/longhorn/audsel.mspx

I'll be posting pictures, quotes and details from the trip so stay tuned.