TechEd - Keynote

Just arrived in the room for the keynote. Of course as it usually happens, all the devices I carefully put on charge last night were not charged, which include camera and camcorder. Expect multimedia content tomorrow instead :(

The room features two screens on which bee videos are being broadcasted, as well as live video from two artists doing some real-time tagging. It all sounds very social network. The theme is orange and yellow, very cyber-opera! And for one the wireless network seems to be sustaining the load quite well!

[13:59] S. Somasegar gets on stage.

TechEd gives a chance to interact with some of you. A lot of you have had a crucial role in delivering .net 3.5, through feedback, technology previews, bugs, scenarios you highlighted and taking a bet on those technologies. For this I'd like to take the opportunity of saying thank you.

When I went for dinner on Saturday my colleagues organized, two things made it an experience: the food of course, but also the environment and how it was presented. Alike, Differentiated user experiences are what will drive the next generation of applications.

It's two years ago that we've launched Visual Studio 2005. As of today, there are 1 million professional developers using vs2005, and that's a phenomenal number. As well, we had over 17 million downloads, a mind-blogging response. At the other hand of the spectrum, we wanted to get into the lifecycle tool space. Over a fourth of our developers are using the Team System tools. But our developers are a community. A few years ago, if you asked a question you would get 30 or 40% chance of getting an answer. Today it's 80%.

Microsoft has always been since 1975 a platform company. Every piece of software is always thought about as having a platform component and a user interface component. The best thing we can do is to create a modular and extensible platform. We want to make sure we have the most vibrant developer and partner communities.

My 11yo does not know programming but spend a fair amount of time online, she's on facebook, she wants to customize her home-page, and share what she's creating. She wants to create an online experience even though she's not coding. My wife is an accountant, she doesn't code as part of her day to day work, but to automate some tasks she sometimes code. You have different experiences for different platforms for different users.

That's why we have different tools and different platforms.

As we speak, the product team is putting the final touches to .net Fx 3.5, which is the next big step for productivity. You should be able to use your .net programming when you do client, services, cross-browser web through silverlight. We already have .net 3.0 that we released in Vista with WPF, WCF, WF... AddIns in WPF, WCF protocol additions, designers being integrated in Visual Studio.

But my favorite is Language Integrated query, LINQ. You had the data world, and the programming world, and they were different things. You have to understand the data language, the constraints and understand the semantics to write your application. We said, let's reuse your skills, what if you could use the same query system as a first class citizen for your objects, for your data.

Silverlight is the new platform. We shipped the first version earlier this year. and we'll push further with the version integrating .net

While we finish the framework, we also finish Visual Studio. For the first time we're supporting multi-targeting. For the first time yu can have one toolset and build applications that target 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5. Looking at the feedback people are very happy we're going that path.

If you're building an AJAX platform, it's integrated in VS2008. If you want Vista technologies, .net 3, we have designers. It's also easier to target applications for office 2007. You used to have to buy VSTO and you get all the tools. We got feedback that it was more complicated than it needed to be, so we took the feedback and integrated VSTO in VS2008 Professional.

We have a good story for VS with server, client, office, cross-browser. We've integrated database tools as well.

And finally we released earlier this year Expression Studio to enable a smooth workflow between Expression and Visual studio.

We also want to continue delivering more prescriptive guidance. Patterns & Practices will continue and we added the S+S (Software+Services) solutions, so it's easier for you to build yoru applications.

MSDN used to be a publishing platform where we pushed articles. It was a good start but msdn should be a community platform. The community can come together through forums and be self-sufficient. We now have MSDN Wiki, took our documentation and published it and added a wiki to annotate content and add content. Just like we've translated visual studio in many more languages. Using automated translation we provide a base for content that the community can build on. Were working on the Portuguese documentation.

Currently we're working on MSDN Code Gallery. There's no easy way to share a sample code. MSDN Code gallery will let you do that. We'll release a beta sometime in the next month, and Live in the next year, so you can come and share your code samples Code gallery. I want to turn MSDN into a community platform and we're well on the way.

Today we're making available a technology preview for Microsoft Sync Framework. Take data synchronization to a new level: it's a framework to enable synchronization for your application, for peer2peer and offline capabilities. Take a look at it and give us a feedback. [EDIT: Is that the return of the sync work from WinFS?]

Software+Services Blueprints is the first guidance we release for standard scenarios. I'm a big user of Outlook 2007. My wedding anniversary is coming next month. Would it be nice if there could be an add-in that integrates the wedding date, buy on its own the present based on analyzing my previous spending, on its own without no intervention buy and deliver the present? [EDIT: What the frell?]

The Blueprint is a bunch of prescriptive guidance and building blocks

As we speak today, later this month we'll release the RTM [EDIT: I Wonder where the RC1 went? Or do they think beta 2 was good enough?], and we'll ship soon after that.

Tony Goodhew is working for the Prodct marketing team is going to do a demo of the cool stuff you can do with Visual Studio 2008.

[EDIT: I won't retranscript the demo, I doubt there's much inherent value for my readers in describing someone showing technology that's already available to people].

I hope you had a play with the beta. We've shown you what you can do with it. Let's see a video of what really happened to get Visual Studio 2008.

[EDIT: Video is slightly funny, I'll let to others the pleasure of commenting on it. Let's just say it emphasize the fact that VS2008 was built by VS2008.]

In 2005 we took a bit longer than we wanted to deliver, in hindsight, you did a good choice delivering it. On the way there was a whole bunch of tide overs, and we only managed to do what we did because we had visiblity on our project, where things needed help, more resources or scoping.

We have more than 200 partners devliering mroe than 2000 products. We're making changes to our partner programs. Some of our partners wnat to target other platforms, we're removing the restriction on using our tools to write for other platforms. We're also making the Visual Studio source code to our partners, and debug your add-in. Dan Fernandez will show you some of the products that can be done.

[EDIT: Demo of an open source project for World of Warcraft add-ons for designing worlds, it was built in a few weeks by a few developers. Show demo of LUA editing].

With Express editions we wanted to expand our audience. Popfly is a visual mashup system: as an open beta last motnh, there's been 100k customers.

With Popfly, you can publish your web page to popfly. Popfly explorer and visual studio integration will help with that.

[DEMO: Visual Web Developer and Popfly explorer beta: It's available at http://www.popfly.ms/Overview/Explorer.aspx).