TechEd USA 2004 Keynote

It was hard getting up this morning.  I kept mentally calculating the time back home in Wellington where it's 5 hours earlier.  So I woke from traffic noise at 6am, and straight back to sleep untin my alarm at 7am.  Yes that's 2am in New Zealand.  Joy.

I'm watching the Steve Ballmer keynote.  He says that productivity and total cost of ownership are the most important things that IT can provide to business.  But on the upside, he says next 10 years will bring more positive change and innovation than the last 10 years.  "How many data access layers does Microsoft really need?"  Apparently CEO's ask Steve this.  He said that 24 years ago when he started at MS customers only wanted Features, features, features, features, features.  Now they want us to listen, listen, listen and they also want features, features, features.

Rebecca Dias showed a demo of WSE 2.0 RTM and something new called the Office IBF tech preview (Information Bridge Framework) for a better GUI integrating of Office with web services that you build in Visual Studio .NET.  She showed us purchasing some shares from within Outlook and inserting the confirmation number back in to the email.  I'm going to have to do some reading on this one.  It looks like a nice way to provide a GUI for accessing Web Services business logic.

Both WSE 2.0 RTM and the Office IBF tech preview are on MSDN or available at TechEd in the Connected Systems break-outs.

We heard that Oracle, SAP and Tibco have announced they will integrate with Visual Studio .NET.  We also heard that more than 50% of developers are using .NET now from a Forerster report and we heard about McGraw Hill who spent 2 years developing a system on Java before switching to .NET.

Announcing the Visual Studio 2005 Team System.  This stuff is amazing.  It's for group developement, modelling, test, etc.  Real enterprise deveoper stuff.  The demo by Prashant Shridharan showed team shared tasks, a web services designer (from whitehorse), an infrastructure designer (also whitehorse).  They call it designing for operations - enabling it professionals and architects to communicate more effectively.  We saw unit testing tools in the Visual Studio .NET environment and integrated code coverage tools.  You can prevent a code checkin until all code has had unit testing run over it.  There were integrated static analysis tools for finding potential security faults.  Integrated performance testing tools.  Wow!

Don Box has just wandered up to the presenter desk in the room I'm in.  I have to go find out what he's speaking on.