Microsoft Kicks Off TechEd 2008 with Gates and Previews

Published: June 4, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Some 5,000 developers this week converged on Orlando, Florida, not because they are daring in the face of the beginning of the opening of the hurricane season, but because the TechEd 2008 developer conference is probably one of the last times that they can expect to see Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates do something as mundane as walk down Programmer Memory Lane and make some relatively minor product Microsoft previews.

The TechEd 2008 event is being broken into two pieces this year, with the developer's conference part of TechEd North America running from June 3 through 6 in Orlando and kicked off by Gates. Week two is an IT professional's conference running June 10 through 13, with Bob Muglia, the company's senior vice president of Servers and Tools, opening up the second act in his own keynote.

Gates is not only the richest programmer in the world, but he is also a programmer who has seen a wide variety of programming languages and complex software objects created with them, so it is usually interesting when he speaks. (Although I would guess that a private, off-the-record conversation would be truly enlightening.) "When I think back on the early days of development when we were all programming in DOS, and then take a look at what we can do now with technologies like the .NET Framework, it simply amazes me how far we've come," Gates said in his keynote address. "I started out as a developer and that’s what I remain at heart, so I have a personal interest in the future of the field. I am confident that the path we are laying out today will serve you well into the future."

Like other platform providers, Microsoft has its own legacy users who are not inclined to change tools and their applications just for the sake of modernity and elegance, and as such, Gates talked a bit about allowing programmers to use their existing skills to move their applications forward with richer interfaces and functions. If you missed Gates' keynote address, you can watch all 1 hour and 45 minutes of it here. Luckily, I will give you the highlights.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is coming out in August and will support 20 different languages. The final release of the new Web browser for Windows is currently in Beta 1 (since early March) and being put through the paces by developers. With IE 8, Microsoft is trying to adopt more HTML and related standards rather than worry about complete compatibility with IE 7, the current release of the browser. Specifically, IE 8 will do a better job of coping with AJAX code, RSS feeds, and cascading style sheets. Gates also said this week that the company's "Flash Killer," Silverlight, will have the Beta 2 of its second release put out for developers to play around with. Silverlight is a key component of media-rich Web content delivery, and is apparently being picked up by NBC Universal and deployed as part of its coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. Microsoft also put out Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008 and released Expression Blend 2.5 in what it is calling a June preview. Expression Blend is a tool for creating Silverlight content.

Microsoft also this week is announcing community technology previews, or CTPs, for a number of different programs, including a distributed, in-memory application caching program code-named "Velocity" and Sync Framework, a tool that allows for offline use of collaboration tools. Sync Framework will be released in the third quarter of this year, with full support of the FeedSync open protocol format, says Microsoft. It also says that it will put out a preview of Windows Mobile support for the Sync Framework in the third quarter, too.

The company is keen on showing momentum with another project, code-named "Oslo," which is Microsoft's approach to services oriented programming and, it claims, heterogeneous SOA application programming. Specifically, Microsoft said that Oslo will be at the heart of future versions of Visual Studio, System Center, BizTalk Server, and SQL Server, and that it will have visual modeling and composition tools, a repository plunked into SQL Server 2008 for application metadata, and a new declarative modeling language.

Gates announced that Microsoft and IBM will be collaborating on development of DB2 applications, and that they have specifically been working to give Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition access to DB2 databases. How it is possible to launch a tool that doesn't include DB2 access is a bit of a mystery, really. While SQL Server and Oracle databases dominate Windows shops, DB2 has a growing share on Windows and is pervasive on other platforms.

RELATED STORIES

Microsoft Unveils New 'Oslo' Approach to SOA

Microsoft Unveils Silverlight 'Flash Killer'

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