A Few Early Microsoft Tech Ed Announcements

“The Cloud is absolutely a major transformation in the industry”
                                                  – Bob Muglia at Microsoft Tech Ed 2010

At Microsoft’s Tech Ed 2010 conference, a number of announcements have already been made. You can view the webcast of the keynote online; however, a few of the keynote tidbits follow.

One of the first announcements of interest to developers was the availability of .NET Framework 4.0 for Azure applications. You can now download the Windows Azure SDK from http://www.windowsazure.com. This includes IntelliTrace support, the Visual Studio Tools and SDK for doing more cloud computing stuff. The Windows Azure Content Delivery Network is also now generally available.

On the operating system side, Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows 7 SP1 will be available in July.

Windows Intune was mentioned. Windows Intune allows you to manage and take care of your PC and environment. This product has entered the beta stage. With InTune you can do inventory management, patching, understanding of software in your environment, and anti-malware support are a part of this.

On the SQL Azure side, it was stated that SQL Azure now supports 50GB databases as well as DayaSync and Spatial data. As a side note, Bob Muglia pointed out later in the day that SQL Azure is not just a version of SQL Server being served from the web, but rather is a separate product based on SQL Server .

A demo of PowerPivot was presented. Related to this, Silverlight will have the PivotViewer available later this month. The PivotViewer allows you to create a number of dynamic presentations using large amounts of data easily. In the demo that was presented at Tech Ed, Bing Maps was also used. The SDK for Bing maps is now available as well.

At the end, there several dimensions that Microsoft covered for related to the cloud. These include:

1. The cloud drives server advances that drive the cloud
2. Cloud enhances social and professional interactions
3. The cloud wants smarter devices
4. The cloud learns and helps you learn, decide and take action
5. The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities

In the end, the message in the Tech Ed keynote was simply, the cloud is maturing and now is the time to be using it.

In a press conference with Bob Muglia after the keynote, he made a good general comment. To paraphrase, things never come as quickly as we expect; however, they often are much more important than we expect as well.