Thursday, May 14, 2009

Developer news from TechEd 2009

As you may have gathered from my live keynote coverage on Monday, TechEd 2009 is not shaping-up to be a great conference for developers. With zero (zip, nadda) coverage of developer topics in the big TechEd keynote, the tone was set for a conference that would continue to prove heavily biased to the IT Pro. So, news from TechEd for developers: Uh... Well... There's... I've really got nothing. There is no beta for .NET 4 or VS2010. There is no new Silverlight 3 beta. There is no preview of ASP.NET 4 features in the Microsoft booth (I know- I'm working there). There's no update for Azure or SQL Data Services. There's not even new info about possible release dates for any developer technologies. It's really a conference devoid of much exciting content for developers. The general feeling at the conference amongst developers (the few that are here) seems to be clear: MIX and PDC are the events to attend and TechEd is now an IT Pro event. Sad, but unavoidably true...

4 comments:

Gregory Wilmes said...

From http://teched.indepthtalk.net/TechEd/Tracks/Developer_Tools_and_Languages/25814.item :
"Beta 1 releases of VS2010 and .Net 4 are both likely to be made available for download sometime over the next couple of weeks, and possibly as soon as the week of May 18."

Fingers crossed :/

Todd Anglin said...

@Gregory- Yes, there is some chatter like that (and little news, like the new Toolkit controls), but they're not doing anything with it at TechEd. The "official" line here is: There is no new release date info at this time. Expect .NET 4 and VS2010 sometime in the next year.

If there is a beta for May 18th, then they missed a -huge- opportunity to get some value out of the release by promoting it at TechEd!

-Todd

Dave, Brighton UK said...

Dunno what you think Todd, as you are there, but perhaps they should take the "Tech" out of TechEd.

Thanks for reporting back though; much appreciated by those who aren't in the US, and furthermore like a dev-centric independant viewpoint.

Todd Anglin said...

@Dave- Well, IT is still "tech"- it's just not "developer" tech. For my money, I'd attend PDC and MIX for now, especially since PDC has become a regular conference that doesn't focus exclusively on long-term MSFT plans. Hopefully TechEd will "re-balance" next year.

-Todd