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.

Microsoft has released betas of the first service packs for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5:

Earlier today we shipped a public beta of our upcoming .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases.  These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since we released the products last November.  They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better (see below for details on some of them).

We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates.  You can download and install the beta here.

At the first link there’s quite a list of enhancements including SQL Server 2008 support, ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named "Astoria"), and the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ASP.NET 3.5 extensions previewed in December.

Today Microsoft is cranking up the hoopla for the 2008 refresh of their mainline server and tools products: Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008. Visual Studio 2008 is already generally available and SQL Server 2008 won’t ship until 3Q, but some there is some claim to relevancy for the launch event beyond the marketing hype since Windows Server 2008 became generally available today.

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Visual Studio 2008 was released to manufacturing in November and it has now become generally available:

Microsoft is proud to announce the availability of Visual Studio 2008 in volume licensing, retail, and MSDN download.

This exciting new version was released to manufacturing (RTM) on November 19, 2007 and at that time active MSDN subscribers were able to download it right away.  With its inclusion on the January 2008 volume licensing price list, the product is now available to sell and ship to your customers via Open, Select, Enterprise Agreement (EA), and Full Packaged Product (FPP).

One last hurdle: the marketing hootenanny in Los Angeles on February 27 where VS2008  will be “launched” along with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

As promised last week, Microsoft yesterday released preview versions of the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions:

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