TechEd 2008

The TechEd North America 2008 Developer Conference started this morning. Microsoft Chairman, Bill Gates, did his last public keynote speech. The keynote started with a very interesting video on Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft. The main stars of conference this year are SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, SharePoint 2007, SilverLight 2.0, and Windows Communication Foundation. The keynote focused mainly on these products and had three demos on WPF/SilverLight, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 Data Services respectively.

After the keynote, I attended an interesting session on SQL Server 2008 new unstructured data storage. In SQL Server 2008, Microsoft has introduced a new FileStream Data Storage. FileStream Data Storage allows large binary data to be stored directly in an NTFS file system, while preserving an integral part of the database and maintaining transactional consistency. FileStream Data Storage will enhance performance of web applications that require back-end relational data storage and are heavy on big BLOB files. FileStream Data Storage will be an excellent fit for SharePoint document management applications, SharePoint streaming media applications and SharePoint record management applications. I hope Microsoft will introduce this data storage option with SharePoint soon.

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My other areas of interest were SharePoint, ASP.NET, and Visual Studio 2008, so I spent rest of my day attending various breakout sessions and technical discussions on these technologies. ASP.NET and SharePoint sessions were very popular among the TechEd developers and hence were very crowded. I particularly enjoyed Visual Studio 2008 sessions. Visual Studio 2008 provides excellent features for developers to make coding, debugging and testing easier. Unit testing features of Visual Studio are now available in professional version of Visual Studio 2008. These features were only available in Team System version in Visual Studio 2005. JavaScript debugging is also topnotch in Visual Studio 2008.

What else? I also got a free signed copy of Andrew Connell’s new unreleased SharePoint book . Woo Hoo!

It was a very busy and productive day overall. I am really excited and looking forward to the rest of the week.