On March 27 I attended the launch event for Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008 in Tulsa, OK with a couple of fellow co-workers. We had a great time and learned quite a bit, both from the presenters and from the experience overall.
Microsoft called the event Heroes Happen Here which for some reason I found slightly insulting simply because they seemed to be playing off the stereotypical geek's anime and video game obsessions (neither of which do I have) and the premise was that by saving our company money and building better applications for them, we would be idolized as heroes. To me, that sounds like someone just doing their job and caring about the company they work for. But I digress...
One of the presentations we saw was on Office Communicator, which was very informative. The presenter showed us how you can manage instant messages, emails, video conferences, faxes, phone calls, and more all from one tool, including routing things to and from your mobile phone(s). Sounds great and looks cool, but I couldn't imagine actually using it on a daily basis. It was so complex that I could forsee most users (the non-uber-geeks) getting confused very easily. The presenter also referred to their status icons as "jelly beans" which I guess I was just in a cynical mood but I didn't like the analogy because the best they could come up with were colored circles and yet even the presenter didn't realize the difference between a circle and a bean shape. That being said, having recently written an instant messaging application and been involved with conceptualizing integrating email with custom applications, I was extremely interested in how they did it. I am researching more into it since the presentation was more about what it can do rather than how they do it.
Another presentation we saw was on WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and XAML. This is a really cool technology that is available but has great potential both to be used and misused, as far as user interfaces are concerned. Essentially every item is a container and the presenter showed us how, for example, you could take a button and put a textbox inside of it, and then on an event handler have the textbox disappear and the button's text be replaced with the text from the textbox. Not a very pratical example but it showed the power that was available. Very cool. With the Expression Blend product now available as well, developers and designers can play more nicely together and integrate their designs much more easily.
We also watched a presentation about utilizing VS2008 to write add-ins and other components for the Office suite. Previously this was done with an add-on to Visual Studio called VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) but that has now been integrated with VS2008. The specific enhancement that caught my eye was the visual designer for integrating with the ribbon control, which used to only be able to be manipulated through XML.
The last presentation we saw discussed synchronizing data sources when users do not have a constant connection. It was really cool to see how it can keep data sources synched and let the application determine which source's changes should override what. Along with this came a demo of LINQ, a very cool and powerful tool to make writing data queries easier with IntelliSense and other features, including the ability to use LINQ to access data from several different types of data sources, including CSV files and SQL Server databases and more.
Microsoft hooked us up with some free software, a branded lunchbox, and I snagged a free "Heroes Happen Here" pen. We spoke with several vendors that attended and learned about some of the third-party solutions that are available as well.
If you ever get the chance to attend an event like this, I highly recommend it. I really enjoyed it and it felt great to really be part of a development community rather than just someone who reads some posts online and some books in the spare time.