This week Microsoft’s Tech Ed conference is happening inDallas, Texas. This conference usually means a number ofannouncements from Microsoft and related companies. Forexample, Microsoft has already announced that the nextversion of SQL Server (“Yukon”) will be delayed. It isnow slated to release with the next version of VisualStudio .NET (“Whidbey”). This isn’t expected until thesecond half of 2004.
Paul Flessner, Microsoft’s Senior Vice President for theWindows Server System Division, gave a keynote presentationat Tech Ed. In talking about the unlimited potential of IT,he gave a statistic that was fascinating. Paul stated,
“All of the equipment, the computer equipment, purchased between 1950 and 1965, all of that computing power at a cost of $10 billion at that time can now be purchased in a $1,000 home PC. The rate of change is unbelievable.”
Here are a few other tidbits from the Paul Flessner’s keynote:
- “One of the most popular things you can do as an IT manageris figure out a way to take costs out of the ongoing operationsevery year and give some of that money back.”
- “You have to think about your apps in terms of longevityand being connected, and that’s what Web services are about.”He then goes on to state that what you need for doing Webservices are federated identities, security, naming anddirectories, hardware devices, process and work flow, andlanguage definition. All this has to be dynamic and managed.Of course, Microsoft has all of this ready to go!
- “A lot of work is going into again making that [CommonLanguage Runtime] a good platform. IIS rewritten in essence –kernel mode caching much faster, process recycling — the abilityto really make IIS super performant and much, much more reliable.”
- Exchange Server 2003 Release Candidate one was announcedand released.
- SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services is going into publicbeta very soon and we plan to ship it by the end of calendaryear 2003.
- One big announcement (in my opinion) was that the developeredition of SQL Server 2000 will be reduced to $49 down from $499.The result of this is that the product will be embedded in a numberof other products. This includes a copy in Borland’s C# Tool.
- Windows “Longhorn” is currently slated for sometime in 2005.At the same time yet another edition of Visual Studio .NET shouldbe released (code named “Orcas”).
