Microsoft News Tracker

Bill Gates made a valedictory appearance at this year’s TechEd and along with a Steve Ballmer robot had some some development related announcements:

• Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 will be available in August.
• Silverlight 2 beta 2 will be available this week with a commercial Go Live license along with Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview and Microsoft Silverlight Tools beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008 as tooling.
• "IBM and Microsoft have agreed to work together to integrate IBM DB2 database access with Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition."
• A new community technology preview (CTP) of the Microsoft Sync Framework, which will be released in the third quarter of 2008 with full support for the FeedSync open protocol format on devices. A CTP for Windows Mobile support will also be available in the third quarter 2008.
• The first CTP of the Microsoft project code-named “Velocity” which provides a a distributed, in-memory application cache. "Large clusters of machines can be seamlessly integrated into a single cache, providing high availability to data."
• Reiteration of a commitment for the “Oslo” project for model-driven development which will "include visual modeling and composition tools, a foundational repository built on SQL Server 2008 for managing application metadata, and a new, declarative modeling language to enable interoperability of models between tools and domain-specific modeling notations."
• A new version of Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 v1.2.

Not on the formal program was a certain amount of uncertainty over the arrival of SQL Server 2008:

He said Microsoft’s SharePoint Server would become the first Microsoft product to use enterprise search from its Fast Search and Transfer acquisition. The delayed SQL Server will be next. "Think of it as SQL Server, but it’s really Fast," he said.

For all the talk of data services, there was still no date on the next edition of SQL Server. Demonstrating SQL Server 2008, Dave Campbell, from Microsoft’s data storage platform division said SQL Server 2008 would be available in the "next month or two."

SQL Server 2008 is due in 3Q so it is not really past its latest due date. Fast Search & Transfer was acquired by Microsoft in January.