San Diego, May 24, 2004 – This year’s Tech*Ed is absolutely packed with attendees; it is a sold out conference. Many people were present during the first keynote presentation by Steve Ballmer. He started off with an official announcement of the Dreary Sky Initiative, a new technology enabling Microsoft to bring typical Seattle weather to any place in the world, even to sunny San Diego.


After a hilarious start Ballmer went on to more serious topics. He told the audience that the theme of this Tech*Ed: “Do more with less” right now more important is than ever before. Because of the slow economy there is an enormous pressure to cut costs everywhere. Therefore it is very important to get high productivity tools out to the market, but also to reduce total costs of ownership. These days it is great to be a software developer according to Ballmer. In his vision people who develop software do more than just making money. They are also helping to change the world in a positive way. It is his strong believe that the next 10 years will see more innovation than the previous 10 years. This is a bald statement, thinking about the fact that 10 years ago the PC was a luxury item, cell phones were rare and the Internet was not yet a common playground for the world population.

Ballmer explained that the next version of Windows, code named Longhorn has been moved backward because more work needed to be done to get Windows XP SP2 finished. Currently there is a SP2 release candidate available, but the definitive release will not be shipped until it is absolutely correct. Security is still the hottest item on the agenda. Ballmer said that keeping systems up and running is extremely important. In his opinion it is unacceptable that hackers can successfully attack systems. According to Ballmer security is not only Microsoft’s responsibility, developers all over the world need to be trained, but the industry also needs to work closely together with governments all over the world to enforce legal action against computer attacks. Something similar should happen to ban spam. Spam is probably the most annoying thing there is right now although security is of higher importance. Ballmer stated that it would help if it would be more expensive to be in the spamming business. Today it is much to cheap to send bulk emails.

For software developers the arrival of a truly Unified Development Platform with Visual Studio 2005 will be very important. Even though Visual Studio 2005 will be the centre of development tools, all Microsoft products must become extendable by third parties using XML Web Services. Steve Ballmer went one step further, mentioning that it should be possible to have a unified way of accessing data across all applications, independent of underlying operating systems and hardware platforms. That is the reason why Microsoft is really committed to open standards and interoperability according to Ballmer. The unified way to interface between different applications, but also between devices and applications is by means of XML Web Services. Therefore Microsoft is very active in WS-I, the Web Services Interoperability Committee. During his keynote, Ballmer officially announced Web Services Enhancements 2.0. He also announced a public beta of the Office Information Bridge Framework which enables Office to become a smart client front-end to Web Services on the Internet and within enterprise organizations.

With a proud voice Ballmer said that .NET is the preferred developer experience. According to Forrester, over 50% of all US developers are working with .NET. Customer surveys told Microsoft that .NET code is 67% more reliable than native Win32 code. Developer productivity of .NET developers is 76% higher than Win32 developers and .NET code is 2.7 times more secure than native Win32 code. This means that .NET really is the way applications should be created. More and more companies are actually integrating their development tools inside Visual Studio. Amongst them are Oracle and SAP.

Next year we will see the biggest release ever done by Microsoft for developers with the arrival of Visual Studio Whidbey and SQL Server Yukon. The expectation is that there will be a 50% code reduction in common scenarios. Ballmer also spoke about Visual Studio 2005 Team System, dedicated to software development in large teams. The product comes out of the box with integrated enforcement for unit testing and integrated code coverage tools. It will even be possible to forbid deployment of untouched code, thus enforcing developers to write new unit tests if not all of their code was covered during testing. This should be a big step towards delivering better applications the first time they are released.