Tech·Ed 2006 is sold out, that’s probably old news. If you can’t be there, you can at least watch about 40 breakout sessions that will be live from Boston – for free.
You may try your luck accessing the page https://www.msteched.com/content/webcasts.aspx for the events. I haven’t been able to get through, right at the moment I wanted to give my new ASP.NET control a try. This control will create a calendar item from input parameters and can off course also be bound to a datasource, such as a DataTable. I wrote .. ehr snatched a few regular expressions to extract the necessary data. But if the data is not available, it’s kinda hard to extract anything. Fortunately there’s Google’s cache, where I found an olded listing which will work. As soon as the http://www.msteched.com/ is back online, I’ll switch the feed.
So here’s the result, a listing of upcoming webcast events with a button to add the event right in your Outlook Calendar. I haven’t tested it across different timezones (my site is hosted in Europe), so I you notice an timing, or any other error, let me know.
For some reason Outlook 2007 doesn’t really appreciate this. I you open the Calendar-item directly from the browser you get an error. But if you first save the file on disk and then open it, there’s no problem. Outlook 2003 doesn’t have this issue.
Update:
Wow, this is weird. It turns out the www.msteched.com site is not down at all. It’s just that I cannot access the site under Windows Vista (beta 2). When I open the site from my laptop, still running XP, but with IE7 (beta 2) there’s no problem. Can anyone confirm this?
Update 2:
It appears that some sites cannot be opened with Vista (beta 2) because the webservers don’t respond well to the tcp autotuning feature that is enabled by default. I managed to access the sites by turning off this network auto tuning with the command:
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
Since this is a network setting, it affects all browsers. It’s not a IE7 issue.