Office 12
Since I joined Microsoft Belux last year I've been thinking about moving my blog to MSDN. But ever since I didn't really saw the added value of moving my blog as both sites are using the same platform:
CommunityServer. But since a couple of weeks I've heard a lot of very positive feedback on the recently deployed 2.0 version of
CommunityServer that powers the
MSDN and
TechNet blogger sites. So far the experience is far better than on DonNetJunkies. Today I finally decided to move my blog to
http://blogs.msdn.com/davbosch/. I want to thank
Donny for hosting my blog since August 2004.
So please subscribe to my new blog on the MSDN blogs:
Thanks for reading my blog and I hope you will continue to do so at http://blogs.msdn.com/davbosch/default.aspx!
This week I've been working hard on the agenda for the Developer & IT-Pro Days 2006 in Belgium. This year's Dev & IT-Pro Days take place the 7th and 8th of March in the ICC in Ghent. This technical training event offers all attendees a combination of practice oriented information and in-depth technical training sessions.
Since yesterday all sessions and most of the abstracts can be found on-line. Thanks to Wim for that!
Take a look at the list of great speakers that will be covering all these topics and please don’t hesitate to provide us now with some great feedback on the agenda. Only the attendees will benefit from this, as we still have some time to tweak things.
Developer & IT-Pro Days 2006 – The Connected Generation
Why attend?
- Technical education: During the two-day technical event, experts will demonstrate the different aspects of our platform and how networks and applications can be created, deployed and maintained. It is a technical event and not a marketing event. Participants will go home with new technical knowledge that they can apply immediately in their daily job.
- Technology Evaluation: Besides diving deep into the current products and technologies, attendees will also get a hold of information that helps them prepare for the future. Systems, applications and technologies are constantly evolving. Be prepared to face the future.
- Community and Networking: Grab the opportunity to educate and consult, to take advantage of peer-to-peer learning opportunities. Network with your peers; talk with them about the challenges that we’re facing at in IT. Check out the Belgian user groups and join them if they cover topics of your interest. The Developer & IT Pro Days is an excellent event to expand your network and to leverage the developer and IT professional community.
- International and national top speakers: Just like on the previous events, we have the pleasure to present a number of international and national high quality technical experts and speakers in their specific area of expertise.
When and where?
Who should attend?
- IT professionals
- System architects
- Network administrators
- System administrators
- Information Workers
- Software developers
- Software architects
- Database Administrators
- Web Developers
- Academics
Registration
- Register now. The first 400 persons to submit their registration will get a Microsoft Press Book for free.
Partners of Microsoft in this event can be found on http://www.microsoft.com/belux/nl/devitprodays/default.aspx#partner
More info on the Developer & IT-Pro Days 2006 can be found on http://www.microsoft.com/belux/nl/devitprodays/default.aspx.
See you there!
Now that Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 are out of the door it's time to get ready for Windows Vista and Office 12. For the latter make sure to check Arpan Shah's blog post "Getting ready for Office 12". Arpan list a few things to keep in mind when getting ready for Office 12.
Earlier this week Jeff Raikes publicly announced the availability of Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005. The release of BSM 2005 together with the major business intelligence investments in Office 12 will make the BI more accessible to employees and valuable to organizations.
Business Scorecard Manager is a comprehensive scorecard and dashboard application that provides knowledge workers with deep contextual insight into business drivers. Information is delivered in a collaborative environment for effective business management and action in the performance-driven organization.
More in-depth overview of BSM 2005 and its benefits can be found on http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA012225141033.aspx. The press release is available at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/oct05/10-23BiLaunchPR.mspx.
Last Thursday Microsoft Belux held its annual Partner Conference in Gent. Theme of the conference was "Going Beyond". Most partners I talked to found the conference very successful and interesting.
Bruno Segers, General Manager Microsoft Belux, kicked off the conference with a great keynote on Microsoft history and how Microsoft will evolve in the next years. After some partner testimonials and some video intermezzo the BG's (Business Group Leads) did a great job explaining what partners could expect from the different Microsoft segments. Whether you talk about infrastructure and security solutions (Michael Kögeler), the applications platform (Stefan Lamberigts), information worker or productivity solutions (Carmen Dubois), Microsoft Business Solutions (Philippe Gosseye) or how Windows Vista will bring clarity to your world (Wim Van Winghe), it was all covered in the BG's overview session and more in-depth in the solution tracks afterwards.
The closing keynote was delivered by Vincent Van Quickenborne, State Secretary for Administrative Simplification, covering the Kafka project with some great examples of administrative simplification. After that it was time for a great party!
In the morning - before the official start of the partner conference - Microsoft organized a number of summits (CPLS / ISV / IW). As track owner for the ISV Community Summit I decided to bring some future and current platform and product-related content. The first session was on the future of our platform and how Windows Vista and Office 12 will increase the ISV productivity. Next to that I gave an overview of some of the opportunities that ISV's can benefit from when using Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 as an integrated application platform. To close the ISV summit, an summary was given of the FY06 partner program and how ISVs could handle the changes.
Throughout the day I received a lot of questions on the MSDN Subscriptions and its levels (that are about to change), Visual Basic 6 to VB.NET upgrades, SQL Server 2005 Express and migration from MSDE, ... I'll address these topics in upcoming posts.
Had also a lot of great feedback from the people who attended the IW Community Summit. One of the presentations that were very well appreciated was the BIWUG-session which covered some Office 12 highlights. Good to see that the community was present for the Microsoft partners!
So, overall, great conference, lots of interesting content, a lot of people and a great networking opportunity. Let's go beyond in FY06!
This morning during the keynote on day 2 of PDC 05 Eric Rudder announced lots of new interesting technology:
Windows Workflow Foundation: is the programming model, engine and tools for quickly building workflow enabled applications on the Windows Platform. It consists of a WinFX namespace, an in-process workflow engine, and designers for Visual Studio 2005. It is not a product but a set of assemblies that soon will be a standard part of the operating system just as the Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communictaion Foundation. Office 12, WSS 3.0 and even MBS will leverage the WWF to provide workflow capabilities in these products.
Microsoft Expression: is a set of professional design tools that give you greater flexibility to create sophisticated applications and content. Innovative technologies enable faster and richer interface development for Windows applications or the Web. Compatibility between products increases all levels of your personal productivity. Microsoft Expression consists of:
Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Applications: is an advanced environment for application customization built on the Microsoft .NET Framework. Visual Studio Tools for Applications fully supports the .NET Framework, and enables development in VB.NET and C#. A premium is placed on security, connected systems (ease of Web-services based development), high productivity and collaboration for both the technically-skilled professional developer and departmental developers involved in application customization. Visual Studio Tools for Applications allows independent software vendors (ISVs) to provide a unique user experience to their customers without having to modify their core product for each installation.
If you want to know more about this morning's keynote, make sure not to miss Jelle's post.
After the keynote most people I spoke to were super-excited about the Windows Workflow Foundation. This platform technology will indeed change the way we develop applications today: over all logical layers of an application, from the datalayer over the businesslayer to the UI. You could even imagine implementing an MVC model by using WWF. Besides that WWF is a huge present for a lot of smaller ISV's who think about building or have build workflow based applications. Only coolness!
Next on the schedule was the "OFF405 - Windows SharePoint Services: Using ASP.NET 2.0 Technology to Extend Pages, Sites, and Server Farms" session. This session was the first one to unveil some of the new Windows SharePoint Services v 3.0 features. The session covered in depth the areas of Web Parts, master pages, pluggable providers and authentication. Huge was my suprise when Mike Ammerlaan introduced the "Son of the SmartPart" aka SmartPart version 2. If you are wondering what this is all about check the Son of the SmartPart's post with details at http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2005/09/14/425192.aspx. I am amazed to see that a community tool driven by a very smart Belgian guy is picked by the Microsoft WSS teams at Microsoft Corp. and is considered as "the way" to make it possible to host APS.NET 2.0 Web Parts or user controls in the current version of Windows SharePoint Services. So congrats Jan and keep up the great community work or as Mike Fitzmaurice blogs it "Rock on, guys!".
pdc05
This morning PDC 05 was officially kicked off with the keynote of Bill Gates and Jim Allchin. [Watch it here].
Bill Gates started with a fun video on his recruiting efforts and talked about the industry trends and how they influence the Microsoft platform investments. Next talking point was the enhanced user experience: from HTML and the ATLAS framework to a smart client application illustrated by Office 12, Windows Vista and the Windows Presentation Foundation.
After that Chris Caposella, Vice President Information Worker product management group, started demoing Windows Vista. Some of the cool new features like virtual folders, the sidebar, etc that are present in the Windows Vista build being handed-out at PDC, were shown.
Chris also talked about the IE7 parental control and anti-phishing efforts. IE7 cool features shown were:
- quick tabs: tabbed browsing taken to the next level
- easy printing of web pages: shrink the page to the paper format
- RSS support: auto-detect all rss-feeds being present on the page and subscription
Next was an exciting overview of the new Office 12 features and how the Office System has evolved to become a real server system. The best example of this is the Office 12 and SharePoint integration.
Some killing Outlook features were also demoed:
- creating tasks from a message; a uniform task type for all applications.
- play and view PowerPoint slide decks from within the Outlook message preview window
- rss integration in Outlook; subscribe to an rss feed in IE7 and it shows up in Outlook.
- search box integration
- and many more!
Next on stage was Jim Allchin talking about and showing the next step for the Windows Platform. Jim went through the major building blocks that compose Windows Vista:
- UI:
- ATLAS: the Atlas Client Script Framework is an extensible, object-oriented 100% JavaScript client framework that allows you to easily build AJAX-style browser applications with rich UI and connectivity to web services.
- WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere)
- DATA:
- the LINQ Project, .NET integrated query language
- COMMUNICATION:
- Infocard: is the code name for a WinFX component that provides the consistent user experience required by the identity metasystem
- WCF or the Windows Communication Foundation: a Web services technology and unified API that helps developers and organizations overcome the challenges of building connected systems both within and beyond the enterprise
All this brand new stuff was turned into reality by Don Box, Chris Anderson, Scott Guthrie and Anders Hejlsberg. They integrated all of this new technology into an end-to-end scenario. They even leveraged VirtualEarth. Amazing!
All in all I very much liked the keynote and I'm pretty excited on these new technologies. The keynote very well illustrated the deep investments in Windows Vista, Office 12, and other technologies that developers can use to build great applications and solutions that enable “The Next Step” of computing. It should be clear to everyone that the Office developer story becomes very important and that it will remain important in the next years. I know some people who will be very happy with this! ;-)
After the keynote I picked up "the goods" which include the Windows Vista build 5219. This pre-beta2 build was used during the keynote for all demos and I'm being told that it runs pretty stable for being a pre-beta 2 build. Peter is currently installing it ...:-)
After lunch I attended the session "VSTS: Behind the scenes of Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server" which provided an overview of the TFS capabilities. An often requested demo - how to achieve continuous integration in VSTS? - was shown to illustrate the capabilities of TFS.
Second session of the day was the most interesting: "Choosing the right presentation technology: Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Forms, ASP.NET, IE and more.
The session covered all the existing and upcoming technologies - ASP.NET Atlas, WPF, Windows Forms - that could be used to show something on the screen and how they integrate with eachother. Amazing demos too!
Tonight there's the PDC reception and afterwards there's a party at the White Lotus. See you there!
pdc05
[Updated] Some more links on the technologies mentioned above: Atlas, LINQ and the New user interface for Office 12 core applications
Sign up for the first beta of Microsoft Office 12 at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx.