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From DevConnections… Day 1

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From DevConnections… Day 1.
Day 1 was all about the keynote and talking with Microsoft. Today the announcement that made the headlines was the fact that Visual Studio 2008 will be hitting the streets *this month* (November) and available on MSDN, ready to go. This is great news – and there are some really significant things that are happening with VS that will help with how you build and support applications.

We have a TON of content and things to tell you about – but getting them written up by the time this goes to "press" in a virtual sense is going to happen over the coming days. We’re still talking with more Microsoft folks too, to get additional information about not only the overall VS announcement, but also the other things that were announced today and that are being offered and updated. Just a quick take:

Steve Guggenheimer was the "anchor" keynote speaker this evening. He talked a lot about many of the same things we’ve seen and heard about before, frankly, but the difference is that there really is a lot more "meat" behind the technologies and approaches now. Also, perhaps I’m a bit slow, but seeing the new tool announcements and then seeing the whole roadmap thing again just sort of solidifies the direction that Microsoft is moving. I must say, it’s impressive to see that they (MS) have stayed the course and indeed are delivering on a very comprehensive environment. I say this MUCH less as an advertisement for the software and more as an "aha!" moment as you start to see the tools evolve.

The key platform products you’ve continually heard about, Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 will all still be featured in the launch party on Feb 27 2008. But, the release dates are slated fro Q4 2007 for VS 2008, Q1 2008 for Windows Server and Q2 2008 for SQL Server, according to the information in the keynote today. So, while the "launch" party will be including all, they will be available in a bit of a step function.

Much about virtualization here, including some new applications of the terms. I have to see some real demos to really be able to explain this as well as I need to, but the "virtualization" is expanding to include what comes dangerously close to the old dumb terminal-type approach – running the application on the host system. I can hear Microsoft yelling now that I’ve over-simplified this, but it’s what first came to mind as I was watching the information in the keynote. I’ll dig more into this and let you know what I find out.

The final bit for this update is about the licensing updates for VS that were announced. Essentially, VS has been opened up to allow for using it as a development tool for applications and such that are NOT on the Windows/Microsoft platform. Embedded technologies quickly come to mind as examples, there are many more. In addition, the IDE can now be included as an actual component of software – you can use the IDE as the editor for a proprietary scripting language, etc. Intriguing, to say the least.

More coming – LINQ, more on VS and Silverlight along with the other technologies here. We’ve been doing interviews and on-camera interviews, so we’ll have some of both over the next couple of weeks as we get them built out and edited.

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