TechEd 2007 Preview: Now It's Developers' Turn to Make Changes

With Windows Vista already a firmly entrenched product in many homes and some businesses, and with Windows Server 2008 cruising toward a final release in the second half of this year, Microsoft may feel it's time for its many partners and developers with an interest in Windows' success to stand and deliver. The company has made many of the architectural shifts and overhauls that these partners demanded three years ago. But for the end user to appreciate the benefits, developers have to change course, too.

So in an effort to move developers along their way, Microsoft is trying a new tack for its TechEd 2007 conference next week in Orlando - the company's largest educational conference each year. Rather than overload the agenda with keynote addresses full of promises, possibilities, and definite maybes, this year only a 90-minute opening keynote address has been scheduled, by senior vice president Bob Muglia. Then the attendees will be released for a full five-day agenda of sessions and laboratories.

It's not to say there won't be major announcements. But the fact is, the Next Version of Windows is already here, so next week's news is not expected to be a laundry list of Windows' failures and promised solutions. Instead, it will be more of a discovery of What Microsoft Hath Wrought: What is Vista, really, and what do we as developers need to do to make it accomplish the things Microsoft says it can?

Didn't we just have a Microsoft conference? Indeed, TechEd comes just three short weeks after WinHEC in Los Angeles, which was geared primarily towards hardware engineers. TechEd covers the broad gamut of the Microsoft developer community, and gives the company a chance to foster something called a "community" that can rival what open source developers manage to gather on their own.

Based on the advance news we've received, the itinerary we've seen, and the buzz we've heard, here are five flashpoints [insert appropriate incidental music here] that are the hot topics we expect to make news next week at TechEd:

1. How warm is Microsoft's embrace of Web standards? Much of Monday's itinerary will be devoted to the topic of adherence to standards already established on the Web, rather than concocting new standards and expecting everyone to adopt them by default because they mostly use Windows.

   Highlighting the day will be a session on Microsoft's standards plans by Molly Holzschlag, the lady who was the high-profile group lead for the Web Standards Project before she found herself accepting a job offer from Microsoft. Holzschlag is a well-reputed public speaker, but here she'll be speaking in Microsoft territory, where rather than defending her job move to the open source community, she'll be doing what she promised she'd do: convince Microsoft developers to play by the book. We'll get a chance to see how well that message holds up.

2. Will Windows without windows take off? At WinHEC, we saw a lot of excitement among the hardware development and administrator communities over an upcoming Windows Server 2008 installation option called Server Core. If you're setting up a server just for a generally unattended role, then you don't really need it to run its own graphical environment. You could just do without one, or administer it remotely using the GUI from another program. But although we talked about it a lot two weeks ago, we didn't see a public demonstration of Server Core yet...and one appears to be scheduled for TechEd. Here, we'll get our first chance to see whether developers at large pick up the same buzz.
3. How scalable will the .NET Framework actually be? One of the few big letdowns about Server Core is that it won't run PowerShell yet, and that's because it can't run the .NET Framework - it requires access to a graphical environment. But upcoming editions of .NET will scale down. What we plan to see up close and personal is how .NET will work not only in a lower-overhead computer environment like Server Core, but also in small devices such as Windows Mobile 6-endowed handsets, and possibly even embedded systems as well. Imagine a low-cost platform for developing applications that scale down to the cell-phone level.
4. Will Silverlight have the same spark as Flash? Microsoft's goals for Silverlight are twofold: to create an opening for its Web applications on other operating systems and platforms, and to stick a crowbar through that opening to help wedge in a piece of Windows: specifically, the former WPF/E component that developed from the Avalon project.

   Microsoft promises to be able to absorb Web developers into the Silverlight community through the languages they're already familiar with, such as AJAX (which is new, but familiar enough). But its marketers hope that developers then wean themselves off of AJAX, whether they're willing or not, into a new framework of Web-oriented C# development.

   However, Silverlight's own developers haven't shown any sign of paving this same road that Microsoft's marketing people have drawn up for it; the first Silverlight demos are all AJAX-based...or maybe just JScript based, in a semi-non-asynchronous way that Microsoft has tried to explain to us before but failed. If Microsoft truly wants to embrace Web standards as Holzschlag wants it to do, then can it reconcile that goal with its roadmap for Silverlight?

5. Where will "dynamic languages" fit into the .NET scheme? Microsoft itself has pioneered the development of a .NET-oriented version of Python, one of Web development's more popular and growing scripting languages. Using scripting languages under Microsoft's managed code environment could create new opportunities for rapid development, and even create a new home for Visual Basic in the product line. But since scripting languages and their tools are typically free, will Microsoft's marketing play down IronPython and other superb dynamic projects the same way it has for Silverlight, as "intermediate steps" in a "good/better/best" scheme toward the same, statically typed C# environment? And if that's the case, will Web developers resist?

The next changes in Microsoft's operating systems could come by way of developers who put the last round of changes to good use...if that's what they choose to do. At TechEd next week, we'll pay attention to how attendees react to the new methodologies they'll be taught, and the new tools they'll be introduced to. BetaNews will be covering TechEd 2007 from Orlando all week, next week. Stay in touch with BetaNews.