Today was a little dizzying. It started with running late to the keynote - apparently the trolley service (though very very cheap @ $1.25) doesn't really run on time - and when I say doesn't really, I mean doesn't AT ALL run on time - it just kinda shows up sometime... but there is a nifty schedule online, which is apparently useless. Missed the breakfast, decided on a Dr. Pepper as a means of caloric injection. It wasn't very satisfying. Neither was the keynote. It lacked energy, the speakers were ok. The keynote certainly wasn't a Steve Balmer typical energizing pick up a gun and blow up Google either. What it was, was a conservative statement about the coming of the cloud, how it will enable your business to be smarter, and how Microsoft is now eating it's own dog food. Meaning, many of these products have been in use within Microsoft for years and they've been making them better for us before we had to live with them.
Something that has a significant push, something that's been a quiet peice of software for a while, is the UC - Communication Server. There are some very neat elements built into it and it's collaboration with all of the MS suite of tools. I'm not really sold because you need to be running Sharepoint, Comm. Server, etc... etc... to have the majic work.
A few emergine technologies that I think are worth looking into that was shown VERY fast are:
Codename Dallas - An open data information look up and provisioning service that is tightly coupled to the .Net dev tools.
MS Excel, specifically Power Pivot - Seriously. This looks intense. Though I got into a very good discussion over lunch with a fellow techy about if they can make some of this work SOOO well with the Excel application, why can't they get it into SQL Server? Seriously, Pivot on 100,000,000 records would be devistating. This has brought back memories of building SQL queries and connection into Excel and allowing it to do most of the hard work. Seems that just might be the way to do it again.
Intelli Trace (great msdn article on it) - I mentioned this yesterday, but forgot to mention the actual tool name. It's getting close to being a DVR for the .Net plateform. Unfortunatly, you need VS 2010 Ultimate to use it. Get this - it's $11,899 if you want to buy this thing... yeah I tuck a little poop as well. Too bad they don't have a SAAS model for it. Wow... seriously? Maybe I should just hit backspace on this paragraph since 12K is a little steep.
Once again, lots of hype about WP7 - I got verbal confirmation from a few people who shall remain nameless that the BETA SDK should be delivered within 30 days. Can you say AWESOME? I saw some pretty impressive feats with Expression Blend and WP7/Silverlight today... I'm just saying.
Finally I went to an Azure bootcamp, signed up for an Azure account (7 free days!) and walked through the steps nessisary to deploy my first Azure Web App. It's not nearly as intuitive as you might think for a Microsoft Tool.
Anyhoo - time to get some work done and try and get enough sleep to pack in 10-12 more hours of this tomorrow.
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