TechEd Developer in Europe

I got a chance to attend and speak at TechEd Developer this year in Barcelona.   The TechEd developer event is happening this week followed by the TechEd IT Forum next week.

Last night I went to a local restaurant “MOO” with some colleagues.  It was one of the best restaurants that I have been to in a long time.  I was thinking about why I felt that way and realized it was both a combination of some excellent food and the presentation of the same.  It got me thinking about something that I have been saying for a while now – we really need developers and designers to work together to deliver the next generation application and web experiences to deliver the best experience for the customers – similar to how you need the chef + the ambiance to come together and deliver a great dining experience for the customer. 

I got a chance to announce some exciting things today.  Here is a quick summary:

·         The product team at Microsoft is putting the finishing touches on Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 as we speak now.  We are on track to shipping these products before the end of November 2007.  We will have the marketing launch for these along with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 at the end of February.

·         We have a very broad partner ecosystem with Visual Studio.  Some of our partners have needs to target multiple platforms.  As a response to our partners’ request, we are going to remove license restrictions with Visual Studio and the Visual Studio SDK to enable you to use the Visual Studio IDE and build applications that target the platform of your choice.

·         For our premier VSIP customers, we are going to provide access to the Visual Studio source code to enable you to better design and debug your add-ins to Visual Studio.

·         Popfly Explorer which is an add-in to Visual Studio.   This enables you to easily add a Silverlight gadget that you built using Popfly to your Web page and to easily publish your Web page to Popfly.  In essence this makes it very easy for you to make your Web site look that much cooler.

·         CTP for the Microsoft Sync Framework that enables you to build on the offline synchronization capability in Visual Studio 2008 and deliver great peer-to-peer and offline synchronization capabilities that let you sync-enable your application.  This in turns enables data (irrespective of the protocol or the data type or the data store) to follow your customer no matter where they are and no matter what device they use.

·         Software + Services Blueprints that contain a framework with source code access, guidance and tools that work with Visual Studio to enable you to easily build software + services solutions.  We delivered the first in a series of such blueprints that enables you to build an add-in to Outlook 2007 that exposes data and interacts with external services.

I had fun both talking about these things and showing some of these products and technologies in action here at TechEd.

Namaste!