On day 2 of TechEd 2005 Europe the conference was officially kicked-off with the keynote of Andrew Lees, Corp VP Server and Tools Marketing, "Ready for Business". He covered the whole Microsoft platform from a developer, IT-Pro and Information Worker perspective and highlighted all major upcoming releases, technologies and innovation investments that Microsoft made for these different roles.
Lees started with the Windows Server platform talking about its 64-bit release, Windows Server 2003 R2 and Microsoft's virtualization strategy with Virtual Server 2005 and Hypervisor. Next was the high-availability of SQL Server 2005 and the performance enhancements for both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Secondly were integrated innovation and developer productivity highlighting Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio Team System. Some of the new features of these products were shown. It should be clear for all attendees that the aforementioned products - to be released later this year - are very important for Microsoft and its overall strategy.
Andrew Lees continued by explaining the Trustworthy Computing initiative and its importance for Microsoft by talking about Windows Update Services, the Baseline Security Advisor 2.0 and how MOM and SMS 2003 could help you manage and secure your systems.
Last topic during the keynote was Microsoft's Security Innovation Commitment. A demo of Windows Mobile 5.0 and its security improvements concluded the keynote.
I found it an excellent keynote talking about what's important for Microsoft and its customers both from a business and technical perspective. Overall it showed pretty well the huge potential of the current Microsoft platform and how it will evolve the next months and years.
After the keynote I decided to take a deep dive into Visual Studio Team System. In the first session Michael Leworthy and Eric Lee did an end-to-end demo of Team System showing how it will change the way of team development. In the next session that I attended Eric Lee talked about the distributed system designers included in VSTS that assist architects in the design and deployment of distributed, service-oriented systems. Besides the basic designers Eric also covered how to extend Team System. As an example he showed a customized security policy and how this could help to make sure that all applications developed in VSTS satisfy the company's security policy.
If you're attending TechEd and you're interested in VSTS make sure to pick up your copy of Richard Hundhausen's book Introducing Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System Beta Edition and a Team System VPC at the ATE booth.