Microsoft Ignite

[I thought my WordPress was working now because yesterday some plug-ins, WordPress and maybe theme was updated yesterday and when I went in to check, I saw I could get the block editor style when I went to start a new blog. Today, I’m back to having issues after updating the Kadence starter plug in. I don’t know if the plug in is the issue or if after logging out last night, the behind-the-scenes WordPress went bad for some reason. Hope they fix this soon.]

Last week I attended the virtual Microsoft convention to learn what new things may be happening in the Microsoft software development world. It was the first time I had attended a Microsoft convention. I have to admit, the first day I encountered some issues: on their convention website, the video would not play – at least not on my machine. I tried various ways to get at the video: tried on desktop, tried on tablet, tried in the evening, tried using the backpack option. Nope, nothing worked.

I was pretty disappointed.

I quit and because I wanted to cheer up, I went ahead and went to YouTube to watch an educational video. It was there that I saw a “live” version of the video was posting to YouTube so I did get to see a portion of the first day event. Luckily, they were posting to YouTube.

Later that night, I gave an evaluation which had 3 questions. Two of the questions I understood to be about the relevance or usefulness of the presentations themselves and the last one was the delivery of the presentation. The presentations I rated as neutral because my experience downgraded my ability to enjoy and receive the presentation. The delivery I rated as a fail. Then I provided why I rated as a fail and said that the prior week, I attended the Adobe Max which had a similar website delivery and I had NO problems. That’s the comparison I provided.

The next morning, I decided to try the website again to see if the problem was fixed.

Yes, it was, Microsoft had fixed whatever was going on.

The presentations themselves were not bad and actually quite interesting. I stuck with the high level presentations rather than delved in to the technical ones as I’m not a software developer, so above my grade. The big takeaway I got was due to the coronavirus, the big emphasis was on developing Teams for more effective collaboration and dealing with cybersecurity. There were a few things about the Power Platform and AI, although I can’t remember any specifics. Again, the information was high level so there wasn’t a whole lot of new stuff from the Power Platform. I’m not real familiar with Power App or Power Automate, largely because my work hasn’t quite extended to those areas. Most of my automation needs does not deal with emails, files, drives, approvals. My automation has been automating Excel activities which Power Automate doesn’t tap into – at least as far as I can tell. I do want to learn Power Automate and will need to dream up a project (or several) in order to see how that works.

Since Microsoft has put the convention on YouTube, I’m going to have to go back and review some of those videos to refresh my memory because I really don’t remember a whole lot (other than Teams and cyber security). There was something about AR, Mesh and Loop but those presentations took place on the first day.

Okay, I need to end here because I have to do my usual nightly data gathering. Maybe I will talk more about Ignite tomorrow.