When I first heard that Microsoft was planning a series of events to celebrate the launch
of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, and BizTalk Server 2006, I was all excited.
It was late October and I knew that the products were due to ship any day.
I'd be one of the first people to see all this great new technology and I'd finally get
my hands on the actual release versions... or so I thought.
I went to the website to find out when the "Launch Tour," as it was being called,
would be rolling into my town. Now I know that Washington, D.C. is not the center of the
software universe and I realize the tour had a lot of stops to make, but when I pulled up
the list of dates, I stared in disbelief
as the date of January 11th, 2006 stared back at me from my computer screen. We were the
last stop of the tour and almost a full month after the previous US event - Boston on
December 15th, 2005.
So here we are. My plans of writing a review of the event in order to help readers
decide whether or not to attend are but a distant memory. I'm left writing about an
event that you either attended months ago or that you can't attend at all. So what's the point?
Well, if you missed it, I'm going to give you a quick run down of what you missed, and if you
went, hopefully this will help refresh your memory.
The Keynote
Usually the keynote is most marketing-laden portion of a Microsoft event aside from the
partner pavilion. This one was no different. Aside from a few demos and an additional level of cool
from using Orange County Choopers as one of the
case studies, the keynote was pretty lacking in actual content.
That being said, if you didn't get a chance to attend one of the events, watching the keynote
online will give you a brief overview of everything and an idea of the atmosphere.
This isn't the keynote I saw, but is actually the one by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
from the first event at the actual launch on November 7, 2005. In order to watch it simply click
the image on the right and it should take you to the webcast until they take it down.
The Developer Tools Track
The event actually had two different tracks: the Data Platform Track and the Developer Tools Track.
I attended the Developer Tools Track because it was what I was interested in. For what it's worth, it
seemed to be the much more popular of the two tracks.
The track consisted of four presentations:
Managing the Software Lifecycle with Visual Studio 2005 Team System
Design and Development Tools for Building Mission-Critical Applications
Web Application Development
Smart Client Application Development and Deployment
For each presentation, I'll include Microsoft's abstract so you know what the session was about
and the slides from the presentation. It's not as good as having been there, but it's the easiest way to
quickly give you a decent idea of what was covered.
Visual Studio Team System: Managing the Software Lifecycle with Visual Studio 2005 Team System
Visual Studio 2005 Team System is an extensible life-cycle tools platform that significantly expands the Visual Studio product line and helps software teams collaborate to deliver modern service-oriented solutions. This session spotlights key features of Visual Studio 2005 Team System and demonstrates how integrating this product into the development process reduces the complexity of delivering high-quality, fully tested applications.
Introduced in this session is the Whidbey Rocks demo application that will be used throughout the developer track. The software developers at Whidbey Rocks use Visual Studio 2005 Team System to orchestrate the construction of their concert ticketing and promotion system, which includes Web applications, smart client applications, SQL Server 2005 databases, and BizTalk Server 2006 integration. The presentation incorporates five roles: project management, infrastructure architect, application architect, developer, and tester. While most of the actual development will be performed in the subsequent sessions, this kick-off session will allow us to explain the goals of the software, set up the team project, select a methodology, identify the team, design the architecture, and send out tasks to each of the team members to construct individual components of the application.
Design and Development Tools for Building Mission-Critical Applications
SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006, and the .NET Framework 2.0 offer a compelling platform for building mission-critical service-oriented applications. This session introduces the features of Visual Studio 2005 that enable developers and development teams to build high-performance, secure, and reliable solutions using innovative designers, advanced code profiling and analysis tools, and an enterprise-ready platform. Among the highlights: how to use Visual Studio 2005 to incorporate SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006, and other operations infrastructure early in the design process.
Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 combine to form a rich platform for building, testing, and deploying state-of-the-art Web applications. ASP.NET 2.0 is replete with new features, from data source controls and master pages to membership and role management services—features that reduce the amount of code required to create a typical Web site by up to 70%. Visual Studio 2005 features an all-new Web development interface that speeds the development process while offering a rich design-time experience and seamless integration with Visual Studio 2005 Team System.
The primary goal of this presentation is to introduce developers to ASP.NET 2.0’s most compelling new features and to the Visual Studio 2005 features that support them. A secondary goal is to demonstrate some of the ways in which Visual Studio 2005 Team System can benefit Web developers, and to drive home the message that ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and Visual Studio 2005 Team System offer a compelling upgrade to Visual Studio 2003 and ASP.NET 1.1. An important take-away is that these products are second to none when it comes to building scalable, high-performance, Web applications
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 greatly simplifies the development and deployment of smart client applications targeting both the Windows and Microsoft Office platforms. This session demonstrates how to create sophisticated, online/offline-capable applications and smart documents using Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Office 2005, and Windows Forms 2.0. Attendees will also learn about ClickOnce, Microsoft’s new deployment technology which combines the power of Windows-based development with the flexibility of Web-based deployment. Highlights include how to use Visual Studio skills to create rich applications that take advantage of existing functionality in Excel, Word and Outlook, all of which are part of Microsoft Office 2003.
The central message of this presentation is that end-users and developers alike prefer software that provides a rich user experience—software that enriches and simplifies the user’s experience in the most natural way for the task at hand. A supporting theme is one of data access that best suits the end-users’ software-use lifestyle as well as situational environment. For example, we show data that is accessed by a ticket-sales tool, which is connected, but then the same data is accessed from an Excel-based application in both the connected and disconnected states. Additionally, the Excel-based application demonstrates the use of VSTO to provide a flexible and familiar environment for a professional, such as an analyst, who can benefit from the rich features of Excel rather than learn a custom application. (Though in fact, the Excel workbook is also a custom solution.)
In a way Microsoft is wasting their time with me... I'm already sold. I've been making my
living using their products and technology for years now and I don't see that changing in
the near future. So it's no surprise that I almost always leave a Microsoft event feeling
excited about the new products. Heck, I'm usually excited about the products before I get
there, but what does surprise me is that I'm not alone. Pretty much everyone was excited --
from the speakers and the vendors in the partner pavilion to the attendees who came and sat
through almost nine hours of speeches and slides. It's an exciting time to be a developer
in the Microsoft camp. Whether you missed the event entirely or are simply thinking back on
it fondly, I hope this overview has either sparked or rekindled some of that excitement in you.
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