Today’s morning started with keynotes. To be honest, I normally do not really like the typical keynotes that are presented at the Worldwide Partner Conference. For me the presentations are too less techy and too much marketing blabla. However, in my opinion today’s talks were better than usual.
I liked especially Steve Ballmer's presentation. Together with some program managers he showed quite impressive demos about softgrid and silverlight (I have some of them in my video above). They built really amazing stuff with silverlight. I am in the business of writing business-oriented apps, therefore silverlight is not a very useful technology on the short term. However, today’s demos gave me some vision about how media-rich tomorrow’s applications could be.
The second point that impressed me most has been smartgrid. Virtualizing applications will be extremely helpful for our customers. Additionally it will remove an important burden for us as software developers because the deployment of full client apps will be made even simpler than it is today. No question, web apps are cool, we do a lot of business with them. On the long term I believe in the return of the full client. Therefore I love technologies like smartgrid because I would love to write WPF apps in the future that offer the same simplicity in deployment as web apps do.
Last but not least Steve's comments on software and/as a service were interesting. He emphasized that Microsoft is investing heavily in building a platform for software as a service offerings: Office live. Unfortunately we do not see much of this in Europe, but I am sure we will. For us as developers this strategic direction of Microsoft is promising a great future. I believe that our customers will love it if we can write apps with even more functions than today in less time and with less effort.
In the afternoon I went to the sessions in the business leader track. Microsoft enlarged the offer of non-techy, business oriented sessions a lot. I love that! These breakout sessions were very good.
In the evening Microsoft Austria invited us to a party evening at the Evergreen Memorial Park. A lot of fun, great food. Check out my video about this event!