Monday, November 13, 2006
Markus Interviewed on Dr. Neil's PodCast

While I was at DevConnections last week in Vegas, Dr. Neil recorded a podcast that just went online here. Enjoy.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Microsoft Release Frenzy

TechEd Europe is in full swing, and so is DevConnections 2006 in Las Vegas (which is the show I am speaking at). Microsoft uses these shows to launch quite a series of new products and betas. Here are some of the bigger points:

• Office 2007 has been released yesterday
• Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office 2007 has been released yesterday
• The .NET Framework 3.0 (including WPF, WCF, and WF) has been released yesterday
• Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET 3.0 has been released yesterday (although many of the more advanced tools for technologies such as WPF are not there yet).
• Internet Explorer 7 of course has been released just a few days ago.
• Media Player 11 has also been released recently

Find more information about some of these things on http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio.

Of course, one of the big items not on this list is Windows Vista. It has not been released officially at this point, but I would be very surprised if that announcement wasn't made today or tomorrow or at least during these two shows.

Also, there are quite a few betas that have been made available now:

• ASP.NET Ajax is available in beta 2
• Visual Studio 2005 SP1 is available as a beta
• Expression Web Designer is available as beta 1 (not a CTP anymore)
• Exchange 2007 is available as beta 2
• SQL Server 2005 SP2 beta is either already available or should be available soon
• SQL Server Compact Edition (formerly known as "SQL Everywhere") should either be available as a beta or will be soon:
• Windows Live OneCare is available as a beta now
• XNA Studio is available as a beta now

And that's not even all I am sure (just blogging a bit in between sessions and meetings). Other things that are coming soon are new versions of SharePoint and also Expression Interactive Designer and Expression Graphics Designer betas will be available in the not too distant future (my guess).