Viva Las Vegas

I just got back from a great weekend in Vegas. I was there to give the opening keynote for DevConnections, a premier event for Microsoft developers, Database administrators, and IT Professionals. Of course in Vegas there is always more than one show going on so in this case we were sharing the town with the professional bull riders (PBR) who were in town for the PBR World Championships. Makes for an interesting black jack table J   And of course being Vegas the temperature was just a little warmer than Seattle perfect for a little “pre-keynote” golf on Sunday with friends….not to mention the good food….and of course there was the work part J

I was thrilled to see that there were over 5000 attendees at the show this year. According to the team this was the biggest turnout for this event thus far. The keynote was standing room only and I would like to think that people came to hear the conversation around the exciting things coming from Microsoft but it easily could have been the $60K worth of products that we raffled off. Our big news at the show was that Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5 will RTM by the end of November. All MSDN subscribers will be able to download them by the end of the month.

We also announced that we changed our Visual Studio licensing terms for partners to allow better interoperability with other developer tools and platforms in addition to Windows and other Microsoft platforms. This change is a direct result of partner feedback. There was other news related to Popfly Explorer, the Microsoft Sync Framework and customer momentum. You can get all the details here.

 We are really excited about RTM of VS 2008. We’ve had 1 million beta users download the product and tell us that the quality, stability and features hit a sweet spot for them. Our early Christmas present to our great community of customers is the RTM. Just make sure to leave a few cookies and a glass of milk for us.