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Tech-Ed: Gates' Farewell to Developers Focuses on Silverlight, Velocity, Oslo
6/3/2008
In what will likely be remembered as his send-off to developers, Microsoft Founder and Chairman Bill Gates today kicked off the annual Tech-Ed Conference with a keynote that took an opportunity to look back on past accomplishments and provide a glimpse into the future of Microsoft technologies.
Gates, who is giving up his day-to-day role with Microsoft July 1, took to the stage one last time to take the wraps off a grab bag of developer-related technologies and updates. Among them were new details about the next betas of Silverlight 2 and Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8), as well as new enhancements around Visual Studio and SharePoint.
Also launched--but not touted in Gates' keynote--is an in-memory cache platform for distributed applications. Codenamed "Velocity," the project aims to boost the performance and reliability limits of enterprise applications.
Speaking to an audience of more than 5,000 developers in Orlando, FL, Gates waxed nostalgic as he recalled three decades worth of computer development.
"When I think back on the early days of development when 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.
Appearing on stage with Microsoft Developer Division Senior Vice President S. "Soma" Somasegar, as well as technical fellows David Campbell and Brian Harry, Gates demonstrated a number of Microsoft development solutions aimed at enabling enhanced user interfaces, more capable data-driven applications and better management of enterprise-scale software projects.
Gates also gave a plug for SharePoint Server development, revealing that Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 v1.2 will provide a simplified development environment for shops looking to extend their WSS and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) deployments.
Data Layer
Joined by Harry, Gates discussed new tooling to help developers model and architect
applications. New architecture tooling in Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) lets
developers check application flows, drill down into the architecture layer and
validate program code against the architecture design. Harry also noted that
VSTS will let developers automatically check for architecture design violations
at check-in.
As part of the demo, Harry showed off an upcoming IBM DB/2 database connector, which will allow developers to do DB/2 development directly within the VSTS Database Edition IDE. Developers can refactor DB/2 database code directly from within VSTS-based projects.
"You no longer have to manage two IDE environments for doing your application development," Gates said. "This is a big step forward."
Gates also trumpeted the Oslo project, the ambitious application modeling and repository effort first announced in November of last year. The first Oslo CTP is scheduled to arrive at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in October.
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