The keynote was rapid fire today. The Microsoft team crammed in a lot of great stuff in a very compact time. I thought I would share my notes, some announcements I heard, and a few thoughts about the opening Keynote for TechEd 2010.
Visual Studio 2010
Of course, Visual Studio is of particular interest to me. I really loved that they got the word out on the new Testing tools especially showing how a bug can provide a full IntelliTrace log for developers to step into the code as if they (and not the tester) found the bug inside a debug session. This “time travel” debugging experience is both an amazing feature and a huge benefit for developers. Look for an upcoming post form me on enabling and creating IntelliTrace logs with Visual Studio and Test Professional.
System Center and Application Deployment
It has been some time since I have worked much with System Center. It looks like some of the promise from the older (2005 / 2008) “architecture” tools in Visual Studio is now baked into System Center. They showed deploying your application through environments using a graphical interface to build VMs. They also showed some links with Test Lab Manager (part of Test Professional).
Cloud Computing
A lot of time was spent discussing Cloud Computing an Azure. One of the biggest announcements for developers was that Azure now supports .NET 4.0. They also announced new Visual Studio tools for Azure that enable configuration and deployment right from Visual Studio (which simplifies the prior web deployment option). Of course, my book just shipped and its tool late to add this in :( … so look for an update via a blog post / video.
Many other interesting things where discussed for Azure, including: you can extend your on premise Active Directory identity to the cloud, Microsoft is enabling people to create their own internal and external clouds, and hosting providers are now on board to enable repurposing the clouds.
Also heard that Intellitrace (see above) is now supported in Azure.
SQL Server Management Studio will soon support SQL Azure management. This will give admins a like experience. They also showed DataSync to keep Azure and other databases in synch; a real need for many moving to the cloud.
Windows 7 SP1 coming in July
No announcement of features / fixes, but SP1 is due to release in July.
Win7 Phone
Windows Phone 7 was also a big focus of the keynote. Of course, Microsoft announced long ago that they intended to reboot their phone platform (thankfully). Obviously, the competition is already way out there (iPhone and others). However, there is no denying this thing is great. It does a nice job of being BOTH a “work” and “life” phone; you can see they spend a lot of time thinking about this and keeping both somewhat separate in the UI but right there for the user.
The phone can also be managed by policy (a big deal for those moving from Blackberry).
The biggest differentiator, however, may be the integration with Office and SharePoint. You get a real nice experience using the Office apps (Excel, Word, etc.) but you also get great connectivity with SharePoint … really nice. I was also impressed with the simplified typing in the touch screen (something my current phone does not do well).
And, you can write apps using Silverlight!
Windows Intune
Microsoft announced Windows Intune beta to manage all your PCs from the cloud. Very promising.
Those were the highlights from my perspective. Plan to hit many dev topics and will update with more info later.
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