• 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…)

In my experience, what you use will vary based on the hat you like to wear most:

• IT Pro – Knows they should setup separate service accounts, but wants to avoid maintenance. So, they use the built-in accounts unless someone complains enough. Some may have even gotten smart about it and written scripts to automate account password updates every month.
• Developer – Ignore the opportunity to setup separate accounts, find the install process complicated or burdensome so they skip this step, or they don’t know better, so they setup the service to use one of the built-in accounts
• Security – Wants to use separate service accounts as a policy, but can’t seem to keep the IT Pro or Developer compliant!

In addition to this basic problem, separate environments for development, testing, staging, and production sometimes require different account credentials! All of this has been exacerbated in recent years by investments in clustering and virtualization. More servers with more services and more accounts to maintain…

In response to this problem, Microsoft released new features in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 called Managed Service Accounts and Virtual Accounts.

Finally! Improve service isolation, increase account security, eliminate administration and support growth of your infrastructure! Read “What’s New in Service Accounts in Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7”.

I am personally looking forward to the release of Microsoft Expression Studio v4 on Monday. Expression Blend is just one of the family of Expression products that has exploded with features, like improved SketchFlow for application and website prototyping, recognition of designer tools like Illustrator and Photoshop through smart imports that recognize and keep design layers, and robust support for Silverlight 4 and .NET 4 including project integration with Visual Studio 2010.

Of course, a mention of Internet Week wouldn’t be complete without the Webby Awards. This year, the awards will be hosted by B.J. Novak, the actor, writer, and comedian made famous for his role in NBC’s show “The Office”. The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. Established in 1996 during the Web’s infancy, the Webbys are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which includes an Executive 750-member body of leading Web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities, and Associate Members who are former Webby Award Winners and Nominees and other Internet professionals. Watch the show live on YouTube!

Regardless, Google shipped its first stable version of Chrome to support Mac and Linux. New features like support for browser settings syncronization between computers, HTML5 capabilities like video and canvas drawing and drag-and-drop without browser plug-ins, and long-awaited improvements to the bookmark manager are sure to please.

In other news, Google generates $54 billion of revenue for the American economy in 2009.

• Entry-level (college grads to 1 year) to Intermediate (2-7 years) .Net developers
• Business analysts
• Enterprise Architect/BI
• Automation testers with QTP – need big time help here!
• Always hiring great consultants!

Submit your resume today!

Windows Server AppFabric

Windows Azure AppFabric

BizTalk 2010

Microsoft recently did a community release event around the BizTalk 2010 Beta and Windows Server AppFabric Release Candidate. Read the overview of BizTalk 2010 features (PowerPoint). See the Introduction to Windows Server AppFabric Whitepaper (Word document) or watch the Application Server Technologies - Past/Present/Future presentation (PowerPoint).

If you haven’t already, Play Pacman using the Google Logo for the next 48 hours! Google is publically celebrating the Pacman 30 year anniversary.

My conservative guesstimates suggest a company with 1,000 employees will lose nearly 33 hours of productivity in their company due to this stunt by Google. Watch the news, blogs, and Twitter for corporate backlash. It will be interesting if a company actually files a lawsuit with measurable productivity loss and/or major SPAM filter companies block Google from now on.

Example Guesstimates: A company with 1,000 employees each spend an average of 3.78 minutes per day on Google. We don’t need to weed out anyone who does or doesn’t use Google, since this is the world population average (that I could find). Perhaps slightly more than 1/2 of that is at work, so 1.9 minutes a day. The game is live for 48 hours. So, back up to… we’ll say 3 minutes to be conservative. I personally spent about 8 minutes when I found out and I know a competitor peer that is hacking the code to get free lives, so he probably spent more than an hour today. So, conservative again, we’ll say 5 minutes. For 1,000 employees, that’s ~33 hours of lost productivity. Nearly a week of someone’s time on the job! For the average American salary, that’s ~64 cents lost for every employee! With these guesstimates, Google alone will lose more than $12,942 in internal employee productivity.

Regardless, the free press this will get Google will FAR outweigh the grievances.

Google Pacman

I spotted Scott Guthrie after his morning session, so I popped a few questions and he was very gracious in spending time with me to discuss them, even offering follow-up help. My follow-up message is below. If these questions and ideas resonate with you, let your local Microsoft reps know, so they can improve the products!