What was I thinking? :-)
Yes last night was late; mostly due to it being Ted Pattison's birthday today.
In either case, Richard, Rocky, and I are in the main hall waiting to see if Microsoft has any secrets to reveal. We shall see.
8:35am Eastern.
Update One: 8:49am Eastern
BobMu's keynote started with a video making a parody of Back to the Future with Christopher Lloyd making fun of past "failed" Microsoft technologies like Hailstorm, Cairo, Storage Plus, "Bob", and even Clippy.
Christopher Lloyd just drove on stage with BobMu in a Back to the Future Delorian.
Update Two: 9:00am Eastern
Bob’s been doing his intro but hasn’t said much. “Doc Brown” said he would call BS if he heard Bob laying out some weird vision.
Update Three: 9:02am Eastern (I think you’ve got part now)
It’s all about “The Journey towards Dynamic”. Tom Bittman from Gartner just came out after a video about Energizer. So far all “IT”, all vision, no meat. WTF. Why did I get up this early?
Update Four: 9:05am
Tom’s talking about IT and agility and hot thi is the “major business differentiator in a connected world”. <sigh> I’m not saying I disagree but tell me something I don’t know.
Update Five: 9:10am
Tom’s still talking. Sheesh. He’s using the A word—agile. Now IT pro’s will be using this and so will all the CIO’s where listen to Gartner.
Update Six: 9:20am
Bob’s talking about new System Center tools and virtualization. Finally some I care about. Bob just announced that Windows Server 2008 “Server Core” will support IIS 7. However, he didn’t mention ASP.NET at all. Jeff Woolsey from the Microsoft VM team is on stage demoing a bunch of VMs running on “Viridian” (Windows Virtualization) and using SCVMM to manage things. He’s showing a V2V conversion—a VMWare VM to Windows Virtualization. He’s talking about SCVMM’s support for Power Shell (everything’s scriptable AND the tool generates scripts for you). He’s demoing a big 64-bit box with a VM with 6 GB of RAM and quad “virtual” processors. Now he’s showing “Quick Migration”—moving a running VM from one machine to another server. Nice. Now he’s showing SC “MOM” 2007 for monitoring. Pretty pictures. :-p
Update Seven: 9:41am
A new demo of System Center 2007. Showing so cool stuff based upon SML-based models. Big step up from NT 4.0 Server. He’s showing the tool monitoring a custom application (web service). He’s showing the “Distributed Application Designer” for IT folks. It has a DSL interface similar to TFS’ Whitehorse. Well, Katmai has a new name—SQL Server 2008. The guy doing the demo is showing tools to manage Katmai .. uh SQL Server 2008 servers. They’re building “modeling” into server products.
Update Eight: 9:50am
Service-Enabled Application Platform is the new slide. Maybe we’re getting to some developer stuff? Mike Woods from the BizTalk team is onstage. The reason I got up. My buddy Jon Flanders is supposed to get some time on stage (he did some of the keynote code). Let’s see. He’s showing BizTalk Server 2006 R2. He’s just published a WCF Service into an application. He’s showing SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services. Showing Dundas controls—a map control—in the report designer. Hey there’s Jon on stage bringing a “box” on stage with a RFID. Jon didn’t say a word but he carries a box really well. Alternate career path?
Update Nine: 10:00am
User-Focused Software is the new slide. Brian Goldfarb’s coming out to show Visual Studio 2008—ah Orcas has name. He’s doing a VSTO 3.0 demo, showing Outlook Form Regions for Outlook 2007 and the new Visual Designer designers. He’s putting a custom WPF control on the region. A picture of Jay Roxe and Eric Carter was on the WPF control. LOL. Only one line of code needed to make this work according to Brian. :-p He’s hooking to Excel Services and building a second custom form region. Only two lines of code here! :-p He’s now pimping the Ribbon via the new Visual Studio designer. And guess what, only ONE LINE OF CODE to enable things! Nice demo overall. But only four lines of code. Yeah right. I’ve got some property to sell you if you buy that!
Update Ten: 10:07am
Jamie Cool is here to demo Silverlight. He’s showing the media player playing the Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Surfer trailer in 720p HD. He’s now playing two videos playing at once in FireFox (wait now 10 videos at once). He’s now showing the Silverlight installation experience. New pretty shining interface. It installs in “seconds”. :-p He’s showing a Silverlight Chess App. He’s comparing a version written in .NET and JavaScript—.NET and JavaScript “play” each other in the game and of course, the AI Engine in .NET works. Now he’s showing “Top Banana”—a next-gen video editing application built in Silverlight—all running in a browser (IE7). Total download size of the application is 50K. And they wrote the application in three weeks. :-p Pushing how it was built using tons of things you already know--.NET, the CLR, C#, etc.
Update Eleven: 10:10am
Microsoft’s committed to “heterogeneity”—is that a word? Orcas and Windows 2008 are shipping “late this year” according to BobMu. SQL Server 2008 ships in yes, 2008. We’re in warp up mode. Lots of new stuff shipping.
End of line.