Day One at TechEd Developer 2008 - The Keynote featuring Ballmer Bot

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Bill's last TechEd keynote as a Full Timer at Microsoft had a new version of an old friend in the form of Ballmer Bot.  The researcher running the robot had it playing Ballmer's well known "developer, developer, developer" line.  Got some of the best laughs of the Keynote.  Other topics included Presentation, Business Logic, Data, and Services.

The speaker for the Presentation segment of the Keynote was Soma, the Sr VP of Developer Division.  Soma highlighted Silverlight 2.0 and the XAML based exchange between designer and developer.  There was a demo of a conveyer belt list view paradigm that was interesting to consider.  As a user experience, what would the user think if the list view scrolled past you?

The speaker for the Business Logic segment of the Keynote was Brian Harry, Technical Fellow on Visual Studio Team Foundation services.  Brian highlighted the architect modeling available in Visual Studio 2008, including the ability to validate a code implementation against the expected architecture model.  The future release code named "Oslo" first appeared here in the presentation.

The speaker for the Data segment of the Keynote was Dave Thompson, Technical Fellow on SQL Server 2008.  Dave highlighted the scale out elements of SQL as well as new programming types that allowed entity mapping, spacial modeling, and a datatype that changed the trade-offs between files as blobs and real file system entities.  Dave also said that SQL server 2008 would be out in a month or two.

Bill covered the Services portion of the Keynote.  Bill talked about supporting a spectrum of business models with services: free, ad funded, and commercial.  Bill also talked about some companies gradually moving to services and cited instances of overload handling and disaster recovery as two scenarios for gradual integration.  "Olso" came up here as being a new, exciting aggregation of models across the application space.  Bill finished this segment saying "Olso" CTP would be available at PDC.

The Keynote ended with Tandy Trower, General Manager of Microsoft Robotics Studio 2008, discussing robotics as a new form factor for applications.  Bill stayed on stage for this entire discussion.  The Ballmer Bot used a Segue like mobility system and had a 8" LCD with Ballmer's face on it.  The robot playing Steve's "developer, developer, developer" line was the best part of the keynote for me.