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Besides announcing the acquisition of devBiz at VSLive!, Microsoft also laid out a roadmap for their upcoming development tool releases:
Visual Studio code name “Orcas”
Visual Studio Team System code name “Rosario”
Follow the link for feature details and also the details on upcoming Team Foundation Server Power Tools, Team Edition for Database Professionals Power Tools, and the Team Edition for Database Professionals Service Pack 1 projected to be available in 2Q07.
I watched the Webcast of yesterday’s TechEd 2006 keynote and offer the modest suggestion that it would be rather better for Microsoft to take it easy on the soporific “People-Ready Business vision” marketing boilerplate and cut to the technical content. To that end, here’s the raw meat:
Security (more details here)
- Antigen e-mail security products announced last week
- Internet Security & Acceleration Server 2006 launched
- Microsoft Forefront announced as new brand for enterprise security products including the next generation of Antigen products. “The Forefront line will include Forefront Client Security (formerly called Microsoft Client Protection), a solution delivering unified malware protection for business desktops, laptops and server operating systems. An early beta version has been made available to select customers, and a public beta is planned for the fourth quarter of 2006.”
Microsoft Application Platform
- A Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the forthcoming SQL Server Everywhere client database was announced - download it here.
- Community Technology Preview of Visual Studio® Team Edition for Database Professionals announced - download it here.
- BizTalk® Server 2006 R2 was revealed last week and there was also mention of a “BizTalk Adapter Pack, a set of application adapters to enable customers to surface line-of-business data directly into familiar interfaces such as Microsoft Office or any client using Web services”.
Exchange (more details here)
- Exchange Server 2007 Beta 2 Announced - available for testing by the end of July
- “Microsoft also disclosed new mobile features and functionality in Exchange Server 2007, including support for search on a device, improved meeting request handling, support for HTML e-mail, message flagging and self-service remote device wipe. The upcoming availability of Exchange Server 2007 Beta 2 is a key step forward to general availability for late 2006 or early 2007.”
Compute Cluster
- Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 released last week
System Center Operations Manager
- Beta of System Center Operations Manager 2007 now publicly available here.
Microsoft Dynamics AX (formerly Axapta)
- Microsoft Dynamics™ AX version 4.0 launched - details here
There’s likely more to come, but it’s certainly a mixed bag of products.
Mary Jo Foley at Microsoft Watch has the story on Visual Studio service packs:
Microsoft is moving ahead on its promise from late last year to release service packs for both its Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 tool suites in calendar 2006.
Microsoft is planning to roll out Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Visual Studio 2003 (VS 2003) in the second quarter. Beta testing of that service pack is slated to begin in late March. The company is readying in parallel SP1 for Visual Studio 2005 (VS 2005), and planning to ship the final release of that code in the third calendar quarter of this year. Microsoft has not gone public with an expected beta date for SP1 for VS 2005.
More details by following the link where there is a pointer to the weblog of Microsoft’s Heath Stewart where he points to a new Visual Studio web page that describes the servicing plan.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Corporate VP, S. “Soma” Somasegar, reports on his weblog that, as promised, the Team Foundation Server for Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) will be available in March. On Monday at the VSLive! conference in San Francisco, he also revealed:
A release candidate, considered a prelude to the final, general release of the product, will be available on the Microsoft Developer Network either this Friday or Saturday…
and other tools news:
Somasegar said Microsoft has had more than 10 million copies of its .Net Framework 2.0 runtime downloaded since the November release of Visual Studio 2005.
“This is by far the fastest adoption of the .Net Framework that we’ve ever seen,” he said.
There have been more than 1.8 million downloads of the Visual Studio Express products since then as well, he said. Visual Studio Express tools offer an abbreviated list of functionality from what the full Visual Studio 2005 platform has. Express tools are language-specific.
Somasegar also cited an IDC survey that he said shows more companies betting on .Net for mission-critical applications than Java, with 35 percent of respondents opting for .Net and 25 percent for Java.
Microsoft in the next week plans to offer a CTP of its planned Visual Studio for Applications offering. Geared mostly toward ISVs, this product is intended to enable .Net-style application customization.
The last two weeks have been rather busy both from quantity of news and competing time pressures, so I thought I would collect some short links to items worth noting that didn’t get separate posts of their own. The down side is that this post gets filed in a ton of categories as you can see above.
- MSN expects China to be top five market by 2010
- Todd Bishop covers Microsoft’s move into high performance computing at Supercomputing 2005, including the Bill Gates keynote and the Sheryl Crow party. He also scores an interview with Craig Mundie, “chief technical officer who ran a supercomputing company before joining Microsoft in the early 1990s.” The latest report is that Burton Smith who left Cray to join Microsoft last week will work for Mundie.
- Microsoft adds Firefox support for Microsoft Genuine Advantage validation.
- The very clever Microsoft virtual labs have been upgraded:
The team just re-launched the TechNet and MSDN virtual labs running on Virtual Server 2005 R2. Check out these sites if you want to test our new software, such as SQL Server 2005 integration services, Windows Server R2 or Visual Studio Team System, in a sandbox environment. Each session is 90 minutes and comes without install, strings attached, or price to participate.
- Microsoft says it won’t support SAML 2.0. It’ll stick with the WS-Federation web service protocols. More here.
- Hyperthreading hurts server performance, say developers:
Intel’s Hyperthreading Technology (HT) is being blamed for server performance problems.
With both SQL Server and Citrix Terminal Server installations, HT-enabled motherboards show markedly degraded performance under heavy load. Disabling HT restores expected levels, according to reports from within the IT industry.
- Paris accelerates move to open source and Vienna’s open source desktop migration takes off.
- Microsoft Taps Former Rational Heavyweight Ivar Jacobson to Lend Credence to Enterprise Tools Play
- Office 12’s slick new UI feature: “Live Preview” and Microsoft Office 12 Beta 1: Extreme Makeover
- New UI Font Coming to Vista, Office 12. It’s “Segoe UI” and I guess I’m going to need new specs:
Office 12 will primarily use the 8pt. version of the font, while Windows itself will use the 9pt. size.
- Vista Will Be Compatible with HD DVD but not in the first release.
- Better Website Identification and Extended Validation Certificates in IE7 and Other Browsers. See also Browser makers to give trusted sites a green look.
As anticipated, today’s big launch went off as scheduled - Microsoft Joins Customers and Partners to Launch SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006:
Microsoft customers and partners gathered today to show their support for the launch of Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 and Visual Studio® 2005 and the upcoming release of BizTalk® Server 2006. Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer kicked off the event by highlighting the tens of thousands of customers and partners that played a major role in the product development process, providing ongoing input to deliver the next evolution in Microsoft’s application platform.
…
The advancements Microsoft is delivering with Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 build on the foundation put in place over the last several years with significant investments in Windows Server™ 2003 and Microsoft .NET, providing developers and IT professionals with a dependable application platform that has underlying support for Web services and service orientation capabilities. The deeper integration of the server and tools with today’s releases enables a host of innovative scenarios and range of new capabilities:• Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 enable developers and development teams to build high-performance, security-enhanced and reliable solutions using an enterprise-ready development platform. Visual Studio 2005 features an expanded set of tools including Visual Studio Team System, an extensible life-cycle tools platform that enables collaboration among software development teams to deliver modern service-oriented solutions.
Hit the VS 2005 home page for version details, features, and launch tour events. (.NET Framework 2.0 info is here.) The Visual Studio Express Editions are available for download free for 1 year. Finally, although it did not get any press release ink, Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0 also shipped and is available for download.
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 provides an integrated data management and analysis platform that helps organizations reliably manage mission-critical information and confidently run complex business applications. With embedded reporting and data analysis tools included with SQL Server 2005, companies can gain greater insight from their business information.
The SQL Server home page has more and the free (forever) SQL Server Express Edition is also available for download.
• BizTalk Server 2006 delivers new features that enable enterprises to better monitor, manage and deploy their mission-critical business processes.
BizTalk Server 2006 is, of course, not ready to ship, but a new CTP was released, a full beta is expected before the end of the year and the product itself in 1H2006.
In addition, Microsoft announced that it will include 16 new integration adapters in BizTalk Server 2006 Enterprise and Standard editions at no additional charge to customers. The move gives customers native interoperability to industry-leading business applications such as PeopleSoft, Siebel, Oracle Database Connector and Oracle Application Suite.
This policy for the BizTalk adapters rated it’s own press release:
Microsoft Corp. today announced that it will include 16 new application and technology adapters in the Enterprise and Standard editions of BizTalk® Server 2006 at no additional charge, including adapters for Oracle Corp., PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems Inc. This announcement marks a significant break from the industry norm of charging additional license fees for application and technology adapters, and offers customers a simple and cost-effective way to reduce the complexity of purchasing, building and implementing application integration and business process automation solutions. Separately, Microsoft announced pricing, licensing and product timelines for BizTalk Server 2006.
More details by following the link.
So what does it all mean besides the release of the latest versions of 2 major Microsoft products and a wannabee? Joe Wilcox says it’s all about integration of the products:
The three products launched today are the first wave of a tide of tightly, integrated products. There is simply no way to overstate how tightly Microsoft has integrated features among its late 2005-2006 software releases. While some Microsoft executives have said that Microsoft bet the company on Longhorn (now called Windows Vista), the real bet is on “Integrated Innovation.”
(See also the press materials [1], [2]) He goes on to discuss the pros and cons of this integration for customers, but I tend to think of the dependency problems for the Microsoft developers - you can’t ship one of the products until all of the prerequisite products are ready and getting them to line up always seems to mean “later” or loss of features and we’ve seen both in this package.
Update:Video of the launch event.
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