S. “Soma” Somasgar keynoted the day emphasizing .NET, smart clients, and mobile technology. Conveniently the themes of the conference. He mentioned the Forrester study I've written on earlier. He showed some case studies about using Smart Clients including:
But, hey, you can check out the case studies page and bone up yourself.
They only news shared was MicroFocus' decision to centralize their development on Visual Studio, and reminder on the Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Microsoft Office System announcement.
I think one compelling sign I'm getting from the conference is that Visual Studio as a development platform is really taking off. Combine the MicroFocus announcement with Oracle 10g Release 2's integration with Visual Studio and you see a clear for tools vendors trend to live within the VS2005 IDE. This will only increase with Team System.
The balance of the day was introducing and demo'ing ClickOnce, ASP.NET 2.0 Web and Web Services, and Team System.
I was disappointed that they put in the “second string” when they were showing off Team System. Ajay Sudan, Product Manager for Visual Studio Team Architect, is definitely not a presenter and did not sell the product.
I saw two very clear things concerning Team System: 1) It will be 3.0 until it's competitive with top CRM vendors 2) it doesn't matter because they are changing the rules. Their focus is primarily on extensibility; they will do features latter or use partners if the market plays out that way. Team System will grow the market and force integration just as vendors are now compelled to integrate with Visual Studio IDE. The most compelling part of Team System is the Team System Foundation itself; the repository and the APIs...and the deep integration it will afford the rest of the software development team with those who use the Visual Studio IDE. It will be extremely compelling, but not right away.
Well, off to Indigo Day!