I spent last week in LA at the PDC. The conference was mainly focused on the new technologies Microsoft is working on bringing to market, such as Windows 7 and Azure.

We also introduced the features in our next VSTS release, which customers were super-excited to see. It's always great to step back at a time like this to take account of what we've been building since shipping the 2008 release. The demos were all using the CTP we just shipped.

I did a perf talk with Steve Carroll that you can watch here.

Some of the features I showed or talked about:

• New run to run trend reports in Excel
• Data collectors used to collect profiler data from the web server
• Using UI tests as performance tests in a "load" test
• New details view for visualizing virtual user actions and performance patterns

Cameron Skinner in his lap around VSTS 2010 also showed some of the new test case management features we are working on, you can watch that talk here.

There are more features in the CTP:

• detailed logging in a load test
• looping and branching in web tests
• editing think times, response goals, and reporting name in web tests

These CTP bits were actually cut in July, so we've added a bunch of new features since then. I can't blog on those features yet, but they are also exciting! At this point we're really turning our attention to shutting down feature work to focus on shipping beta.

Ed.