Having outlined plans to split TechEd across two events in Melbourne and Sydney back in May, Microsoft has now opened registration for the October conferences. We've also learned how it will cram what used to be a four-day event into just two -- by only offering 300- and 400- level content.

IT pros attend conferences in order to enhance their knowledge of existing technologies, learn about upcoming developments and to network with their peers. Unfortunately, some of the ways they behave at those events make actually achieving those goals more difficult.

Hyper-V is built into Windows Server 2012, which means it's very good at running Windows virtual machines -- but the advantage of running Linux VMs is that you don't have to pay for the licences. If you want to run Linux under Hyper-V, follow these tricks for better performance.

Cloud deployments typically rely on abstracting away as many details as possible. So why would you want to assign something to a very specific IP address?

You spin up a virtual machine on a cloud service, you do some testing, then you move on. What happens to that data afterwards? And what about when a drive within the cloud data centre is disposed of?

Visual Studio saw a major update this week, but the developer tool has long boasted a rich set of keyboard shortcuts -- so many that there are always new ones to learn. Two very handy options you may not have encountered revolve around the Shift key.

In a corporate environment where bring your own device (BYOD) has become widely accepted, the competition for business IT dollars has increasingly switched to mobile device management (MDM). Microsoft's play in this space relies on two non-mobile technologies where it dominates: Office and Active Directory.

One of the key Azure announcements at TechEd was Azure Files, which provides a permanent mapped file system that can addressed by any virtual machine in your cloud environment. But why does Azure Files use SMB 2.1, rather than the newer SMB 3.0 release used in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012?

Setting up SharePoint is a masochist's idea of fun, frankly -- but not all the things that can go wrong are to do with the portal software itself. Here are some other platform issues you should check when SharePoint is performing sluggishly.

Azure is the big unifying theme at Microsoft TechEd this week; every session I've been to has made reference to it. But there's one question that still doesn't have an official answer: when will the Australian Azure data centres in Sydney and Melbourne finally open?

So it's an odd Patch Tuesday this month. Windows XP wasn't supposed to be patched after April, but it received an out-of-band patch. Windows 8.1 was supposed to be ditched after this month in favour of its newer Update sibling, but it scored a temporary reprieve. And many IT pro patch deployers are hanging around at TechEd North America, so rollout might take a little longer.

Microsoft's newly-announced RemoteApp tool lets you stream Windows-based applications to computers and tablets using Azure -- effectively creating a virtualised desktop, but with a focus on apps rather than the overall OS. Here's how it works.

Just as TechEd North America 2014 kicks off, Microsoft has officially released Update 2 for Visual Studio 2013. The big addition here is the ability to work on universal Windows apps, which can use most of their code across Windows, Windows Phone and (eventually) Xbox.

Microsoft's opening day keynote at TechEd North America included a stack of new announcements relating to its Azure cloud services. Here are all the key Azure developments, from the new Azure Files storage system through to RemoteApp for delivering desktop apps to end users via Azure, and when they'll become available.

Microsoft's TechEd conference is one of the main tech events Lifehacker covers each year (I'm off to TechEd US in Houston next week). In recent times TechEd Australia has been held over four days on the Gold Coast, but that's changing this year as the event turns 21.

Last week, Lifehacker attended Microsoft's TechEd event in New Orleans with three IT Pro bloggers in tow. Here's what they learned during their four day experience...

A crucial part of our World Of Servers coverage of TechEd North America 2013 was the contributions from our contest-winning IT pro bloggers Tommy Carron, Adam Webster and David Klemke. What did they learn during the week? What does the future hold for Windows Server 2012? Will New Orleans ever be safe again? Read on and find out!

I came to TechEd North America expecting to walk away with a few noteworthy points, maybe even a couple of cool strategies I could possibly on-sell, but what I left with was much, much more than that.

Only four days in and TechEd 2013 North America was already over. Each day had been crammed full of technical sessions and other conference activities. The opening keynote, demonstrations, labs, vendor promotions and of course the Surface queue. Not to mention the abundance of American cuisine to keep us energised as Microsoft's evangelists sought to inspire.