Thursday, October 30, 2008

Latest from Microsoft

New technology/product release spree that Microsoft seems to be in lately has come to its high with the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2008 concluding today at Los Angeles, USA.

It's been not very long since Microsoft has released .NET 3.0/3.5 with completely new technologies like WPF, Silverlight, WCF, and so on. Recently they released the next versions of them (Silverlight 2, and .NET 3.5 SP1) and PDC saw the announcement of Silverlight 2 Tool Kit and WPF Tool Kit.

Other Products/Technologies that were previewed at PDC include Windows 7, Windows Azure, and Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4.0.

Windows 7 (formerly codenamed Blackcomb and Vienna) is the next version of Microsoft Windows and the successor to Windows Vista. I tried out the developer preview version of Windows 7 Ultimate (Build 6801) and found it not much different from Windows Vista in look and feel. But under the hood, it includes a number of new features, such as advancements in touch, speech, and handwriting recognition, support for virtual hard disks, improved performance on multi-core processors, improved boot performance, and kernel improvements. Read more here.

Windows Azure is Microsoft's operating system for the cloud. The Azure Services Platform combines cloud-based developer capabilities with storage, computational and networking infrastructure services, all hosted on Microsoft's servers. Read more here.

The next version of Visual Studio is 2010 with .NET Framework 4.0. Read more here.

I wonder why Microsoft is still continuing the calendar year naming for the versions of Visual Studio while they discontinued it for Windows. Anyway, as developers in Microsoft technologies, there is no end to our continuous learning and re-learning cycles.

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