Today is the first real conference day at Tech*Ed Europe.
The day started with the traditional Keynote, always a good indication of how Microsoft sees the future.
Of course there was, like we are used to by now, the .net and longhorn evangelizing.
Microsoft really has a hard job convincing the world that they are right.
After years of evangelizing, .net is still not really catching on with the developers.
But with Longhorn, of course, this will all change: We will no longer have a choice. We will have to go .net.
But there were other things than the evangelizing. There was also lots of talk about the upcoming Visual Studio 2005.
Microsoft seems to be integrating new competitors for lots of existing third party tools into visual studio.
There has already been the SourceSafe effort, to provide version control. SourceSafe has never gained much credibility, because the folks at Redmond don't use it themselves, and it is not considered reliable. But it is helping small companies out with giving them an easy way to work more or less like bigger and more professional companies.
In the upcomning Visual Studio 2005, there will be tools like BoundsChecker, TrueTime and TrueCoverage integrated into Visual Studio.
All of these are of course introduced as if nothing like it has ever existed before.
I expect the same to happen here: Large companies will not use them, because they want to stick with the established names, which they know to be good.
But it's great that the smaller companies can now also use such tools, which will increase their software quality.
Microsoft also seems to be very much interested in the small, beginning software developer.
Their express products are targeted at these people, making it cheap and easy for them to have good software development tools.
Microsoft will lose money on these products, but it seems like they hope to recover this money later when the beginning programmers have grown up and stick with Microsoft products, now that they are used to them.
Microsoft is also catching up with shareware, having trial versions of many products available, and marketing them the same way shareware companies do.
Are they actually learning things from us?
At 12:30 the exhibition has officially started.
There have not been so many people here yet, but I am expecting the big rush in a few hours, when the meet and greet is being held.
Even with not so many people here until now, it has certainly already been worthwhile to be here.
This kind of visibility is very good for the ESWC, to which we invite you all!
If you are attending Tech*Ed Europe, please come say hello at booth A42 (next to Ask The Experts), where we will gladly explain all about the European Shareware Conference, and demonstrate that shareware can be very good and professional.