TechEd 2008: Developer Highlights

There's more to come: Next week's second week of TechEd focuses on IT professionals. This week's event is for developers.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' keynote went on for nearly 30 minutes before getting to real developer news: August release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and Silverlight 2 Beta 2. He pulled more goodies from Microsoft's developer grab bag.

He discussed the goodies in four areas of opportunity for developers:

• Business logic
• Data
• Presentation
• Services

The IE8 and Silverlight 2 announcements pertained to the "Presentation" topic.

Bill spoke about the importance of the "collaborative process." He added, with respect to Business Logic: Our view has been to do this in a deeply integrated way. Take Visual Studio and expand it, but always have it integrated at a very rich layer."

Over the course of other demonstrations, Microsoft made additional announcements of developer interest:

New Microsoft Sync Framework CTP (Community Technology Preview), with FeedSync and mobile support coming in third quarter. My favorite photo Web site, SmugMug, is one of Microsoft's newest Sync Framework partners. While many people liken Sync Framework to Google Gears, Microsoft is looking to solve synchronization issues much broader than just offline data access. I've repeatedly emphasized the importance of synchronization as the killer application for the Web 2.0 era.

SQL Server 2008. Bill Gates along with Dave Campbell, Microsoft technical fellow, discussed the database's importance. Bill spoke about the data importance of SharePoint Server working in tandem with SQL Server. Dave espoused the benefits of SQL Server Data Services and the relationship to Sync Framework and the database's new spatial capabilities.

If Microsoft was looking to scare the frack out of journalists, I'm terrified, like "Alien" or "Cloverfield" scared. Dave used fictitious company "Trey Research" to demo new SQL Server 2008 data capabilities. Bloggers or anybody else could submit stories and get paid like "freelance journalists." The demonstration was a chilling look at one possible future of my profession. And Microsoft has already built the gallows—eh, application. The Coder Blog has a nice synopsis:

"Bloggers from around the world submit articles and images through either a Web application or Windows Mobile app. News analysts at Trey Research find the best articles and images for a given geographic area of interest, combine them into a story and sell them to companies such as MSNBC; paying the content creators in the process."

By the way, Dave delivered one of the best Microsoft developer content presentations that I've heard in years. He clearly identified real world and developer benefits. The Trey Research demo, while personally disturbing, was outstanding.

Oslo. First CTP will come around the same time as October's developer conference. Bill described Oslo as a "model-driven development platform." Bill spoke about Oslo in context of "Services," particularly those delivered over the Web. I blogged about the forthcoming technology's significance in October.

Bill talked about modeling being done in separate silos, but the need for change. "We need to take all these domains and put them in one modeling space," he said.

Velocity. Microsoft announced a new CTP for the caching platform for enabling computer clusters to provide seamless and uninterrupted data access.

If anybody needs Velocity, it's Microsoft. "We're taking everything that we do at the server level and saying that we will have a service that mirrors that exactly," Bill said. "It's getting us to think about data centers at a scale we never did before." Today, Microsoft has "hundreds of thousands of servers." In the future, the number will be millions.

That statement bugs me. What about parallelism or virtual computing, which are supposed to reduce the need for large numbers of servers? What about other microprocessor advances? Millions of servers might as well be one giant mainframe running everything. Geez.

Steve Ballmer Bot. OK, I couldn't resist. A long demo about Microsoft Robotics ended with Ballmer Bot going offstage, arms upright, to the CEO's infamous, "Developers! Developers! Developer!" chant.