Eric Swanson on Technology Services

MS Tech·Ed North Ameria has been running this week in New Orleans…

• Watch the Tech·Ed videos online - The keynotes (1 and 2) have great insight into Microsoft’s vision; how their 7-year old promise of “Dynamic IT” is just beginning to be realized this past year and even more so with their Azure cloud computing platform, System Center 2010, and Application Lifecycle Management support with tooling like System Center 2010 with Opalis visualization and workflow management, Team Foundation Server 2010 with Lab Management including virtual labs, Test Manager 2010 with record/playback test automation and reusable manual test step definitions, SQL Server 2008 R2 with Data-Tier Application (DAC) integration, and Visual Studio 2010 with support for Azure platform solutions, Data Tier Applications, and IntelliTrace debugging technology
• Windows Azure updates:
  • Support for .NET 4
  • Windows Azure Platform Training Kit (June Update)
  • Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.2 (June Update)
• Expression Studio 4 was released - This is a tremendous update to Expression Studio including improved application prototyping through Blend’s SketchFlow, designer support for path layouts for lists (layout items in a list along any path), enhanced Live Media streaming capabilities with Encoder improvements, robust XAML states and transitions for WPF and Silverlight through Blend, .NET 4 and Silverlight 4 support with designer support, and many, many more improvements.
• I have confirmed that the Windows Phone 7 CTP still works with the Blend 4 release (this was a pleasant surprise after MS released VS2010 with Silverlight 4 beta support in VS Beta 2 and then did not support it in VS RTM until the SL4 RTM - Of course, this was only a few months of waiting…)