I attended the ever first Microsoft event in my life last Tuesday and got the chance to meet Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer in real person (of course he's on the stage). I'm quite embarrassed to say that yet I'm looking forward to meet the CEO of the company I'm currently working at. Steve's keynote was simply just... fantastic. That was the event for launching three key products: MS Visual Studio 2005 (.NET 2.0), MS SQL Server 2005 and MS Biztalk Server 2006. The statement which I found most interesting was that he said there're nearly 70 similar launch events in all over the world and he's got the chance to give keynote to only two of them, one was in San Francisco, US and another one in... (you should know by now). Do you
see how a good presenter attracts the audiences?
In fact, MS Visual Studio 2005 is quite a buggy product and has ways to improve (according to
trustable source), it's either true for today's mainstream Java IDEs but fortunately we (Java developers) don't have to pay for it. I think those VS's developers who don't realize the fact would find this new release cool and amazing. The demo was literally cool, it showed us that a
complicated task can be completed in a few steps although I'm sure that more works have to be done in order to make the final result a full-fledged solution. Anyway I was somewhat dissappointed by the technical presenter in the afternoon session. He's a Malaysian, and was
responsible for the hands-on session, somehow he's not able to resolve a single issue in VS 2005 and failed to produce the assembly which was required by the subsequent steps like deploying to SQL Server Report Builder and to Biztalk Server. Therefore the session ended-up without demonstrating the remarkable features of SQL Server and Biztalk Server, anyway we've seen how powerful MS VS 2005 is.
PS:
Netbeans IDE beta 2 has been released, it runs on Tiger as well as Mustang.
