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.

Overshadowed by the Microsoft Yahoo takeover soap opera last week, Microsoft released version 2 of its Expression Studio collection of Web tools:

• Expression Web 2 for Web design
• Expression Blend 2 for multimedia and 3-D design
• Expression Design 2 for graphic design
• Expression Media 2 for managing multimedia assets
• Expression Encoder 2 for video encoding

Expression Encoder is new in version 2 of the Studio and among other new features, Silverlight support was added to all of the tools, and PHP and ASP.NET 3.5 support was added to Expression Web. The PHP support reflects broader aspirations than just covering the needs of captive Microsoft technology developers but it will be difficult to break the grip that Adobe Dreamweaver has on that market.

Less desirable is the perpetuation of the wacky dichotomy between Microsoft developer tools (Visual Studio) and design tools (Expression). Developers who subscribe to the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) have been promised only a subset of the Expression tools and they will have to either ante up for a standalone copy or buy an Express Professional Subscription (which partially overlaps the MSDN subscription) to get the full set.

S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division unveiled some eagerly anticipated developer tool betas today via his blog:

I am pleased to announce the release of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2, and Silverlight 1.0 RC. 

You can download Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and the .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 from here. Over the next couple of days, we will make Silverlight 1.0 RC available for download as well.

…

To add to this, we are also releasing a Go Live license for Visual Studio 2008, the .NET Framework 3.5, and Silverlight 1.0 to make it easier for you to start developing in our next generation of tools.

Visual Studio 2008 (formerly codenamed “Orcas”) is now feature complete and for Silverlight, Microsoft is also releasing a CTP of the Silverlight Add-In for Visual Studio 2008. For more details on Visual Studio 2008, this video featuring Somasegar and Scott Guthrie provides a useful overview. If you prefer text, Guthrie has more on his blog plus some last minute beta tips.

Update 7/27: The Silverlight 1.0 RC is now available along with some associated betas including the Expression Blend August preview.

You may recall the furor ([1], [2]) over Microsoft’s decision not to make the new Expression family of design tools available to members of the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) based on the not always obvious distinction between “designers” and “developers.” Today, S. Somasegar (Microsoft Developer Division Corporate VP) revealed that Microsoft has taken the adverse reaction to heart and that some of the Expression tools will now be made available to some MSDN subscribers:

Based on this feedback, I am pleased to say that we will be making Expression Web available starting today to all MSDN Premium subscribers. We will also make Expression Blend available to MSDN Premium subscribers shortly after the Expression Studio release later in Q2 2007. Expression Blend and Expression Web are intended to help creative professionals collaborate with developers to create rich user experiences for the Web, Windows Vista applications and beyond, which means we need to make sure both tools are readily available to our developer community.

The decision extends to all MSDN Premium subscribers, including those with Visual Studio Professional and Visual Studio Team Edition’s. For customers that have premium subscriptions to Visual Studio Team Suite, we will be making the entire Expression Studio available to them.

You may be asking, what about Expression Design and Expression Media? Expression Blend and Expression Web are both designed to help creative professionals and developers work together to create rich user experiences for the Web, Windows Vista applications and beyond. As Expression Design and Expression Media are not directly intended for application development, we feel they fall outside the current scope of MSDN Subscriptions. We will be watching usage and collecting feedback of these expression products to help make further decisions in the future.

If it’s not entirely clear which level of MSDN subscription gets what, Joe Wilcox provides a nice chart.

Catching up on an item from last week - Expression Design Beta 1 and Blend Beta 2 Available:

Yey - I know several of our ISVs have been waiting patiently for these downloads. I just need to find a day to try them both out! You can beat me to it by downloading them from http://microsoft.com/expression.

eWEEK’s Darryl K. Taft interviews Forest Key, director of product management for Microsoft’s design tools, and InfoWorld’s Paul Krill interviews Eric Zocher, general manager of the Microsoft Expression product line, to provide the big picture, but the nut is that the Expression family is Microsoft’s new foray into tools for designers as opposed to all the existing tools for developers. The Expression products utilize Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, codenamed Avalon), Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E, aka “Flash Killer” which also has a new CTP) and XAML to create the design elements for rich content Web and desktop applications.

Of course, a persistent side issue of the invidious distinction between designer and developer tools is the fact that the Expression tools are not being made available to developers through the Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN). As long as Microsoft is going to erect barriers between the two, they might as well also create a “Microsoft Designers Network” although they better use a little of that artistic creativity to avoid conflicting acronyms.