City of Angels' Blessings Needed After Vista
Microsoft is hosting its annual North American confab, Tech-Ed 2009, this week. Roughly 7,000 people braved budget constraints and swine flu to attend the conference in Los Angeles, according to Bill Veghte, Microsoft's senior vice president of the Windows business.
As expected, the keynotes, given by Veghte and his team, focused on the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 release candidates; R2 of Windows Server 2008, which is 64-bit only, was made available to attendees yesterday.
The Web platform is a huge focus for Microsoft. The updated Web Platform Installer is designed to promote easier downloads. According to Iain McDonald, general manager of the Windows Server Group, the full ASP.NET stack and .NET runtime will be part of the server core in Windows Server 2008 R2 to decrease the size of the images on front-end Web boxes.
Other announcements on the first day of Tech-Ed included the second beta release of the Geneva identity management platform, as well more news about SQL Server 2008 R2 (formerly "Kilimanjaro") and Office 10. The first CTPs of SQL Server 2008 R2 are expected this fall. An invitation-only technical preview of Office 10 will be made available for a select group in July, according to Veghte.
Microsoft is offering hundreds of sessions at Tech-Ed that discuss .NET 3.5, .NET 4 and related tooling. But where are the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 betas? After a six-month hiatus since the PDC 2008 previews, developers expect to see more bits.
Activity in the Microsoft blogosphere is increasing, a sign that the beta is in the final stages (we hope). A new series by the ADO.NET team on the coming updates to the Entity Framework and its respective tooling was launched yesterday.
Will Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 reverse the curse (I'm from Boston) for Microsoft? Express your thoughts on Windows 7 development below or contact me directly at krichards@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Kathleen Richards on 05/12/2009