Tech-Ed Developer Conference a Mixed Bag
Bill Gates' sometimes-inspired, sometimes-tired
keynote
may have been a harbinger of the first week of this year's Tech-Ed Conference,
which, for the first time, has been split into two parts: the developer conference
this week and the IT professional conference next week.
While the focus on dev tools and issues is a boon for developers and guys like
me who watch this industry for a living, it's a mixed bag for vendors.
Alexander Falk, CEO of XML and data tools maker Altova, believes the quality
of the audience is better than it was in previous Tech-Ed conferences. His problem:
Altova markets high-volume, client-side tooling like XMLSpy, and he'd like to
see more people exposed to Altova's newly released tools suite. He's hoping
next week's IT conference makes up the difference.
From a news standpoint, Gates' keynote ushered in a lot of new technologies
for developers to sink their teeth into, but failed to go in-depth into most
of them. Victor Mushkatin, CTO of application monitoring solution maker AVIcode,
singles out the lip service paid to Oslo, the far-reaching initiative to establish
model-driven application development and a unified repository for code, assets
and resources. He says the keynote failed to move the discussion forward. Granted,
there were some sessions this week that did go deeper into Oslo, and Microsoft
is planning to put more meat on the bone at its Professional Developers Conference
in Los Angeles in October.
Mushkatin did praise Microsoft's new modeling approach, demoed by Microsoft
Technical Fellow Brian Harry at the Tuesday morning keynote. Mushkatin said
Microsoft is making progress in combating what he calls the "complexity
crisis" around SOA and services development, where far-flung dependencies
pose a serious threat to application performance and reliability.
"It's extremely important to make models live," Mushkatin said. "Without
that, models will die. It's just another artifact that you print and you put
on paper. Only if you can look at the code or switch view and see that code
on the model, that's when it makes sense."
Posted by Michael Desmond on 06/05/2008