Bruno Silva

Keynote
Speaker - S. Somasegar

TechEd first session was in the auditorium. It was huge! And crowned also.
The speaker was hard to understand, because his English or his accent (I can’t tell what the problem was) was awful.
But it was nice anyway. It was a quick overview about hot Microsoft Technologies. Not technically informative at all. It was just meant as a candy to drive us the next sessions.
He talked about Designer/Developers workflow and how Visual Studio and Expression Studio are a great help.
He gave us the information that over 1 million people are currently developing on Visual Studio .NET, and there was over 17 million downloads of this software. He highlighted that MSDN forums gives an answer to approximated 80% of posted questions.

Microsoft Platforms are meant to be used for a rookie hobbyist, academic students, designers and professionals/teams of development.
In this section I heard about a lot of things I didn’t knew:
- MSDN wiki - meant to the community of developers.
- MSDN Translation Wiki - designed to expand Visual Studio 8 languages to other languages. He talked about a translation project in Brazil.

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 will be available for MSDN subscriptions in later November 2007.

Some of the new features of VS 2008 were split view (code/design), hierarchic tag selection, full CSS support, multi-targeting (choose the framework version for a project), LINQ designer, new Ajax Controls, intellisense and debugging support for javascript.

It was announced a license change that allow people to use VS to develop to other platforms than .NET framework. It was shown a demo of two World of Warcraft plugin development in VS using a customization pack that will soon be available in Codeplex. The first one was a board with information about scenario objects, and the other one was a RSS reader.

Another announcement was the release of Popfly Explorer Beta. A VS add-in that allows to use Popfly mashups in a webpage developed in VS Express Editions.