Live from TechEd Day 3
Although TechEd doesn't normally have major product announcements (the conference is more about what has already happened rather than what is coming up), this year has been particularly light. Last year, we were caught up in the large rebranding of .NET Framework 3.0, which happened the week before the conference. We were not a newly-announced product, but we essentially had to act that way because it reset people's awareness about the components that Microsoft was shipping. Our role this year has evolved from explaining who we are to more explaining how to use the product.
One product that did get announced this year is Acropolis. Acropolis continues the line of Greek-themed web application frameworks by helping you build client applications that tie together components from multiple different providers. There actually isn't a requirement that you build mashup-style web applications but I suspect that will be a favorite of the early-adopter crowd. Once it gets a bit more mature, I can see the potential here for writing business portal and integration applications faster (and hopefully they'll look a lot better than older generation applications as a bonus).
The keynote address by Bob Muglia on Monday was similarly bigger on vision than substance. The second half of the talk did touch on quite a few products although we didn't get much that was deep or surprising. Here's the list of references that I put together:
- Windows Server 2008 ("ships late 2007") - and more details about Windows Server Core
- Visual Studio 2008 ("ships late 2007")
- SQL Server 2008 ("actually ships in 2008")
- Windows Virtualization
- Silverlight
- BizTalk Services
Next time: Live from TechEd Day 4