So today was the big day…and every event has to start somewhere. This one started with a keynote by Bob Muglia the “Senior Vice President for Server and Tools Business”. Bob did a fine job, but the speech wasn’t my cup of tea (strange saying…I don’t even like tea).

It was basically about how the new Microsoft tools will change the infrastructure of companies. Interesting stuff, if you are an IT guy. The developers began jumping ship kinda early. The highlight was Christopher Lloyd reprised his role from Back to the Future for a little spoof. Good stuff.

Now the rest of this article is mainly for the developers out there. Designers probably won’t get too much from it. There will be some cool stuff for you guys soon.

The first session I got into was about the new Visual Studio. Its now called VS 2008…they are so sneaky…didn’t see that one coming. It is strange to see a new version because a lot of companies are just getting on board with VS 2005, but I digress.

However, there are some really cool things coming with the new version that are enough to make a dev nerd drool a little bit. Here are some highlights I got from the session.

• With VS 2008 another version of the framework will be unveiled (3.5). Seems a bit strange because, again, people haven’t even started playing with 3.0. From what I gather it is just some refinements to the goodies that were introduced in 3.0. Nothing groudbreaking from what I can see.
• Office 2007 Support…this is cool if you are developing for office, but it isn’t something pertanent to this blog so I will just gloss over it for now.
• HTML/CSS Designer enhancements are pretty sweet. I haven’t seen them yet, but they are supposedly a big improvement. Hopefully I will have more later.
• All the steps that you have to go through right now to get AJAX .NET to work will be much more streamlined because the new version has integrated AJAX and JS support
• Local caching is a new feature that I am really excited about. For smaller systems, this isn’t all that sexy, but if you build some software that does some heavy lifting this is definitely drool worthy. Basically it allows you to quickly and easily store all your data on the client side rather than making constant hits to the database. This is doable now, but it takes a good bit of custom code. This is much more seamless.
• XAML support will be native
• I saved the best for last…the new version of VS will allow you to debug javascript (this may include having breakpoints too). Furthermore, javascript will have intellisense natively. I practically started panting when I heard this. I don’t know about you, but building custom js always seems unnecessarily tedious. This will help alleviate a lot of that. Yea!

So there ya have it. One other question that I have been asking was answered…how does Blend fit into all this? Well according to the Microsoft guys, the new Visual Studio will not be capable of making the fancy shmancy UIs that Blend can.

It basically boils down to this…Blend is for making the UI fancy…VS is for making it work.

Something to keep in mind if you are considering diving into the pretty world of WPF.

That about does it for this update. I should have some good Silverlight info at some point during the conference, so stay tuned.