An Audience with Bill Gates
Yesterday, myself, my colleague Jon and about 500 other MS partners, were lucky enough to see Bill Gates speak in person at a 2008 pre launch event in London. Its the first, and probably last time, I will get to see Bill Gates speak so it was quite an experience - one to tell the grandchildren about (when I was in the same room as the world's richest man!). Unfortunately, we didn't get a proper chance to meet Bill, he was wheeled in for his keynote and a few Q and A's and then whisked off to his next appointment (hopefully a good tailor because he was wearing a fairly dodgy suit). With judicious use of elbows we did manage to get to sit in row 3 right in front of him.
Before he arrived they played the infamous "Bill's last day at MS" video which is well worth watching, even just for a bit of celebrity spotting. He then talked about the "Magic of Software" and where he sees technology going for the next 10 years or so. Lots of stuff about pervasive computing, model driven development, cloud services etc. He's probably given this talk a few times and it came over very smoothly. He's obviously still passionate about software and technology and he seems keen to use technology as much as he can as part of his foundation work, particularly in improving healthcare in the third world. He also gave an idea of the areas he would stay involved in at Microsoft: Office, Surface/Touch computing and Search. He talked about Ray Ozzie briefly and mentioned that Ray has admitted that Notes (that Ozzie invented for you youngsters out there) is now obsolete! I wish that was true – we still have the odd client using it, including trying to run one of our ASP.NET apps within the Notes browser!
The rest of the day was showcasing the 2008 launch wave; namely Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. The main launch for these in the UK is on 19th March at the ICC in Birmingham, which is just up the road from our offices. They've had over 2000 registrations for this already and are trying to find more space for it. There will be a few of us there from Contigo so if anyone needs some help on finding the best pubs in Birmingham, feel free to get in touch.
In terms of the new stuff, MS are pushing virtualisation, clustering and System Center management in a big way; we need to start looking at these and we plan to get a 2008 server up and running in the next week or so. We have upgraded a couple of our applications to VS2008/.Net3.5 reasonably painlessly already, although we haven't taken advantage of the new features just yet.
We particularly like the new spatial features in SQL Server 2008 - we mainly develop applications for the energy industry and there a lot of assets which have a location: power stations, gas pipelines, wind farms etc. Linking this spatial data with information on generation, wind speed, gas flows etc could be very powerful and something we hope to do in the near future, probably with Silverlight. SQL Server allows you to store spatial data in terms of polygons, points and lines and then you can do functions such as intersect, distance between points etc.
Anyway, I urge you to attend your nearest 2008 launch event in the next couple of months, if only for the potential freebies if the VS2005 launch is an example.