It all begins February 27th

This week we had our Annual Worldwide Partner Conference.

This is where we get together with partners from around the world to both celebrate their successes and focus on what is coming in teh next year. I was looking at some of the figures which are quite amazing – over 10,000 partners attended this year, 23,000 more via Digital WPC, and we awarded 43 partners for their outstanding successes. These included Getronics (NL) BV from the Netherlands for Custom Development Solutions, Application Infrastructure Development Partner of the Year, Momentum Advanced Solutions from Toronto for Custom Development Solutions, Smart Client Development Partner of the Year and ITWorx from Egypt Custom Development Solutions, Web Development Partner of the Year. It is so great to see so many successes from companies betting on the Microsoft platform.

During Tuesday’s kickoff our COO Kevin Turner announced that the company will be jointly launching Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in Los Angeles on February 27, 2008. As the most important enterprise launch in the company history, February 27 will kick off a “launch wave” of hundreds of events that Microsoft will host worldwide.

While we will be launching our products together in February, we are still aiming to release Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 by the end of this year based on your feedback so far. The launch provides us with the platform to not only celebrate the release of these three great new products, but work with you, our community, to ensure that together we can provide great solutions for your organizations now, and for the future. We will start the ball rolling with the release of VS2008 and .NET FX 3.5 beta 2 later this summer, and expect more exciting news, reviews, training and resources following this.

Namaste!