I got some insight on Microsoft’s next technologies during a developer conference they have held around here. Following is a short brief on what they presented, as my comments will be available afterwards and more detailed.



– Visual Studio 2005 (I’m very interested in this as it will be my primary development tool – lots of innovations here, mostly all are already in the Beta 2 I am using)

– Visual Studio Team System – this definitely rocks, it generates a portal for managing the product (with bug-tracking, project management and source-safe functionalities included, also it even has settings for the project management methodologies like agile or planned)

– Visual Tools for Office (or something like that, basically you can do .net apps embedded in an word/excel document, like VBA but way nicer)

– SQL Server 2005 – I liked the new Management Studio but otherwise the new features are sql extensions for tasks like accessing web services and so on – things that shouldn’t be done from sql server

– Windows Communication Foundation – pretty boring stuff, I hope I won’t have the chance to work with it

– Windows Workflow Foundation – this idea was cool but until now I didn’t have the need of using workflows in my designs (I actually thought about this pattern before, but, as I said, didn’t implement it because there was no need for it)

– Windows Presentation Foundation – here we didn’t got info on the next DirectX but rather XAML only, not very detailed though as the conference was finishing. All the “Foundation” components will be included in Vista.



Of course, the interesting and cool stuff will have more details coming.