Heads Up for the Keynote

We take our seat in the arena. The lights dim and a thumping acid house bass and drum combo kicks in whilst pycadelic imagery flashes before our eyes. You could be forgiven for thinking that we were at a Happy Mondays concert rather than a Microsoft conference but instead of listening to the vile rantings of Shaun Ryder, we are treated to an informative and motivational keynote by this year’s keynote speaker S.Somasegar, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer Division.

He first starts by congratulating the user community for their assistance in making the latest release of Visual Studio the best version yet. In describing the user experience of Visual Studio, a parallel was drawn (by way of analogy/anecdote) to a meal he had the previous night at the Moo restaurant in Barcelona. His evening was memorable for two reasons:

1) The quality of the food and
2) Its presentation and overall ambience of the establishment.

1st class software development too requires a balance of high quality functionality coupled with an attractive and effective presentation layer. Further, each version of Visual Studio incorporates additional functionality designed to optimise the productivity of the developer.

The speaker emphasised that there are different types of developer (ranging from the hobbyist to the pro-developer) and different platforms that are developed against. .NET needs facilitate developers of all abilities to construct the systems they need to develop across a range of platforms.

Visual Studio 2008 increases the bar in a number of ways, from support for multi-targeting to the AJAX integrated libraries. Not to mention the workflow capabilities and comprehensive libraries for further development of MS Office applications.

Whilst congratulating the MSDN concept, Mr Somasegar wants a greater collaborative and community based approach to the sharing of knowledge and discussed the concept of code galleries.

The Microsoft Sync Framework was announced which provides developers with the programming tools required to develop applications that support off-line and disconnected usage. The main thrust was that the data should follow the user across multiple devices and multiple protocols. It was announced that Visual Studio 2008 along with the .NET Framework 3.5 will be available for download from the end of November.

The speaker then introduced Tony Goodhew, a programme manager within the Visual Studio team, who took us through some of the cool features of VS 2008. Such features were:

• Split view screens which allow a coordinated HTML and design view for the developer.
• Breadcrumb lists.
• Greater support for CSS including links to external style sheets and the CSS properties window.
• Multi-targeting.
• LINQ (Language Integrated Query).
• AJAX integration.
• Development with Silverlight.
• Full support for JavaScript including Intellisense and debugger support.

A lighthearted video entitled 'VS2008 - A True Development Story' aimed to convince the developer community that you really can have your cake and eat it as far as this product is concerned.

It was announced that Microsoft has removed the licensing term restriction which stopped the VS IDE from supporting all platforms.

Popfly was introduced as the next generation web-based tool for building web pages, mashups and gadgets.

Finally, the speaker outlined the future for Visual Studio which will see greater support for testing and debugging and offered 4 commitments to us the developers:

• We will be transparent.
• We will listen to customer feedback.
• To build a vibrant community.
• To foster a partner eco-system.

The speaker left the stage to a warm round of applause.