Visual Studio

Windows 7 may have gotten much of the attention at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday, but on Wednesday other Microsoft programs got their turn to shine.

In keynote speeches by Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group; Scott Guthrie, vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Division; and others, attendees were shown demos of Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0.

For every developer who has been waiting with bated breath for Microsoft to spell out its cloud-computing strategy, the day has finally arrived.

During a keynote speech on Monday at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, announced Windows Azure. Azure is Microsoft's cloud-based service foundation underlying its Azure Services Platform.

Microsoft released Silverlight 2 on Monday, the second major version of its platform for creating and delivering advanced multimedia applications and experiences in a Web browser.

The company also said it will continue to back Silverlight-related open-source communities, with funding for advanced Silverlight development based on the Eclipse Foundation's integrated development environment (IDE) and with new controls to developers via the Silverlight Control Pack.

Microsoft warned developers preparing to download the new Beta 2 release of Internet Explorer 8 that under certain conditions those who have already installed IE8 Beta 1 cannot revert to older iterations of the browser.

For Windows XP users with IE8 Beta 1 already installed, Windows XP Service Pack 3 and IE8 Beta 2 would become permanent, said Jane Maliouta, the deployment product manager for IE8 at Microsoft. "You will still be able to upgrade to later IE8 builds as they become available, but you won't be able to uninstall them," she said.

Incompatibility Issues

It's not often that you hear people who are involved in technology referred to as "heroes".   Most of us are just techno-geeks trying to do the best we can.   And while I don't necessarily drink the kool-aid as far as those of us who are using the newer Microsoft technologies being called heroes, I have to say I was struck by Tom Brokaw's opinion of what technology has meant to our world and our society.