Soma Somasegar, VP Developer Tools, and Bill Gates describe the paradigm shift in client application development at the Developer TechEd this week in Orlando. As part of that discussion, several announcement that can help ISVs are being announced.

• Silverlight 2 Beta 2: Availability in the first week of June with a commercial Go Live license. The release is combined with releases of Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 and Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008.
• Integration of IBM DB2 into Visual Studio Team System Database Edition.
• CTP of Microsoft Sync Framework now includes Windows Mobile and full support for FeedSync open protocol format.
• CTP of Microsoft Project Codename "Velocity", a distributed in-memory application cache platform that makes it easier to develop scalable, high-performance applications needing frequent access to disparate data sources. Large clusters of machines can be seamlessly integrated into a single cache providing high availability to data.
• Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 v1.2 to help developers use Visual Studio 2008 to extend value of Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint.