Microsoft TechEd 2008 Developers Conference Keynote

By Doug Holland (Intel) (233 posts) on June 3, 2008 at 9:11 pm

During the keynote speech this morning of the TechEd 2008 Developers conference, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates reflected on the company's 33 years as the world's premier software developer, with over 5000 software developers in attendance to learn about how they can best leverage today's technologies while gaining insight into future technologies. During the speech Bill Gates began by announcing that he will be departing his full-time job at Microsoft, effective July 1st, and will then, instead, work full-time with the Gates Foundation. As with most keynote speeches, Microsoft provided attendees with some humor as Bill Gates was seen in a video portraying what his last day at Microsoft might be like with him emotionally packing his desk and departing the Microsoft campus in a small blue Ford Focus. The comedy continues with him calling Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain looking for a possible VP slot within one of their bids for the presidency, followed by a conversation with the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair about working with him on various projects. Still searching for some other ways to use his new found time he is then seen with Mario Batali in the kitchen and speaking to George Clooney about appearing in Oceans 14 although George states "of course, if we were making Oceans 14 you'd be in the movie ... but we're not making Oceans 14".

So, even though the Microsoft TechEd keynote speech is generally an entertaining event, that's most likely not why you're taking the time to read this blog post as such I'll leave the humor here and move on.

"When I think back on the early days of development we were all programming in DOS, and then take a look at what we can do now with technologies like the .NET Framework, it simply amazes me how far we've come," Gates said, "I started out as a developer and that's what I remain at heart, so I have a personal interest in the future of the field. I am confident that the path we are laying out today will serve you well into the future." He went on to say he was envious of developers who are beginning their careers today given the quality of the tools and the choice of languages available to them.

Bill Gates is then joined on stage with S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President Developer Division, where he discusses what Microsoft is doing for developers and designers within the presentation layer. Technologies and initiatives announced that build upon Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 for the presentation layer include Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 which will be available in August with support for 20 languages and the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 which we are told to expect later this week. The Silverlight 2 Beta 2 release will include a Go Live license and will also be used by NBC Universal in creating over 3000 hours of streaming content from the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Silverlight 2 Beta 2 was demonstrated through an application called Crossfader which allows the sharing of digital content such as music and photos though an "interactive immersive experience", allowing high quality video at low bit rates.

Brian Harry, Technical Fellow Developer Division, then joined Bill Gates on the stage to take us to the business logic layer, describing the advances in technology Microsoft will be delivering to developers to assist in this layer, which is generally where the largest quantity of code exists within applications. Central to Microsoft's Oslo vision is an expansion of support for software modeling and Brian Harry demonstrated Microsoft's commitment to software modeling through the forthcoming Rosario release of the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. A CTP of Microsoft Oslo will be available at the Microsoft PDC conference in October 2008. Within Rosario, in addition to providing support for several UML diagrams, Microsoft will introduce a new architecture layer diagram that allows architects and developers to gain an insight into the high level architecture of an application. The architecture layer diagram is accessible through the Architecture Explorer.

Brian Harry also demonstrated support within a forthcoming release of Visual Studio Team System Database Edition supporting IBM's DB2.

Within an enterprise application, in addition to the presentation and business logic layers, there is the data layer and to discuss the data layer Dave Campbell, Technical Fellow Data Storage Platform Division, joined Bill Gates on stage for a discussion on SQL Server 2008. Dave Campbell demonstrated several new features of a SQL Server 2008 including the support for geo-spatial data which is covered by this short blog cast. Within the following entity data model you can see that the latitude and longitude are supported within the Location entity. SQL Server 2008 provides support for this geo-spatial data with constructs such as the STBuffer that return an object representing the union of all points whose distance from a known location is equal to or less than a specified value.

Finally, Bill Gates is joined on the stage by Tandy Trower, General Manager Robotics Group, to discuss Microsoft's recent entry into the field of robotics with Microsoft Robotics Studio. Although Steve Balmer was unable to make it in person to join Bill and Tandy, Robo-Steve made a dramatic appearance, presenting Bill Gates with a life time subscription to XBox Live.

Categories: Software Engineering

Comments (2)

June 5, 2008 9:14 AM PDT

Anthony Carrabino

Nice summary post Doug. Here's a link to additional details regarding the SQL Server "Trey Research" demo presented by Dave Campbell:

http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/archive/2008/06.....-2008.aspx

Anthony Carrabino
Microsoft

June 7, 2008 10:32 PM PDT

Doug Holland (Intel)