TechEd Developer 2008

I had the pleasure of being in Barcelona this week for the TechEd Developer conference. Highlights – getting to talk to several hundred developers about WF / WCF / Dublin /Oslo. Lowlights – it’s Barcelona, what could be a lowlight? TechEd capped off the most interesting 8 weeks I’ve ever had in software. In under two months we’ve had major iterations on virtually all the technologies that we drive in CSD. It started out with a roadmap update on BizTalk Server where we provided some more detail on BTS2009 and also talked about the next two major releases. 

Next, we announced major updates to WF and WCF and introduced “Dublin”.  After that, I hit the road with Robert Wahbe, VP of CSD, our fearless leader. We talked to several RDs and various members of the press about Oslo – and progress we’ve made in the last year. We were getting ready to ship the Oslo CTP and wanted to give folks a sense of how it had developed and what they’d see at PDC.

Two weeks ago at PDC we made good on the promise to provide CTPs on WF, WCF, Dublin, and Oslo (including “M”, “Quadrant” and the Repository). For those scoring at home that’s a promise kept – one year from the Oslo announcement to code. For those of you who didn’t make it to the conference, take a look at Oslo at the new Dev Center or www.modelsremixed.com. Going further, we announced the Azure Services Platform and opened it up to attendees for an early CTP. As a company we’ve spent the last 20 years democratizing the desktop, we’ll spend the next 10 democratizing the cloud.

Last week we kicked off a new “Real World SOA happens {here}” theme. This features a new online video portal that will showcase the successes of our customers around the globe. This update to the web also highlights a set of events that we’re running to broadly connect with thousands of customers worldwide as part of a 20+ city road show. If you’re interested in learning more about SOA and how you can be successful – check out the new site at www.microsoft.com/soa/launch.