iMav
The Devil's Advocate
sorry for the delay but as promised heres part 1 talking about the technical details given out during the event, please forgive me but im not a Visual Studio and Server guy so my analysis of the event is pretty much a basic 1 showcasing what i felt was worth mentioning 
the goodie bag also has a free edition of the Windows World Magazine recently launched
Microsoft's Largest Launch Event - Mumbai Leg (Part 1)*img100.imageshack.us/img100/3091/77750236fn3.jpg
Watching and following the Macworld Expo for more than 2 years, the Zune laucnh event and a few other launch events it was nothing but a matter of information as to when such an event will be taking place in my neighborhood and I shall pause my life for a day. 3 weeks back i got a mail in my inbox that said that Microsoft will be having their launch event of 3 of their major products other than the Windows Desktop OS, namely - Windows Server 2008; Visual Studio (VS) 2008 & MS SQL Server 2008. Being a Microsoft event there was no chance that i was going to miss it and i had my road blocks to overcome inorder to reach the event. My biggest battle was the faith vs loyalty test that i had to diplomatically overcome which I successfully did and finally reached the venue of the event 2 and a half hours before the scheduled time, seems unbelievable but yeah its true i did. (I had to make sure that I did not loose my enthusiasm while travelling with hooligans in the local train)
Ok however enough with the boring stuff, i registered at the venue got my id card and food coupons when i thought of also posting live updates on a forum that I frequent and I did that from my cell phone from within the hall unfortunately no cameras & laptops were allowed add to that the fact that the early morning hang-over caused me to forget the voice recorder that I had setup specially for the event. None the less the guys gave us a bag of goodies which had a notepad and pen which I made good use of
Steve Ballmer launched Microsoft's biggest launch campaign in the company's history on the 27th of Feb - Heroes Happen Here, where the Heroes are the developers who use these softwares and tools to make the magic happen.
First let me put up the live updates that I had made so that you get an idea of how the event went along:
Now coming to the details of the products and the presentation that was made:
The presentaion of the products was started by Microsoft Senior Vice President, Developer Division - S. Somasegar. He started the presentation by first highlighting what was the main focus on during the development of these 3 products:These were the points on which the whole presentation and demo actually revolved around, showing the new range of products make a developers life easy.
- Secure & Trusted Platform
- Virtualisation
- Web Development & Productivity
- Business Intellegence
It was quite evident from the presentations of all the products that Microsoft has taken great efforts to automate and fasten the administration work, as in the showed and said during the demos of the products that most work could now be done by just a few clicks as opposed to tedious methods in previous versions. Another aspect was that Microsoft is now working hard on integrating the features of their range of products from MS Office to MS Virtual Earth & Live to provide developers & customers with a great experience during making and using the applications
A slide that showed Microsoft's 2008 roadmap with regards to these softwares had the following:First lets see what said about Windows Srver 2008:
- Visual Studio 2008
- Server 2008
- SQL Server 2008
- Hyper V for Server
- HPC (High Performance Computing) Server
- Essential Business Server
- Small Business Server
- Silverlight 7 - which will bring .Net to the Web
Mr. S Somasegar right at the outset wanted to highlight the fact that these products are bankable & trustworthy saying that "You can bet on me" on more than 1 occassion to emphasize his point. He also mentioned that as a move to show customers that their product is tried and tested and worthy to be used they are using Microsoft Server & Microsoft SQL Server in their company for customers to see for themselves - a move he says shows the transparent nature of Microsoft towards its customers with its products. Microsoft has been running on Microsoft Server 2008 for the past 9 months he said.
Next up are some features that he mentioned which stand Server apart from previous Server editions:He said that in WIndows Sever 2008 the SPI focuses on:
- Network Access Protection
- Network transfer 40% faster
- Easier SOftware Deployment
The most interesting of the above I found - Network Access Protection (NAP):
- Compatibility
- Performance
- Security
I will explain this to you in Soma's words:
Let's say that there is a system on your network that is infected, now whenever this system is connected to the network, Windows Server 2008 & Vista SP1 will detect that this machine is infected and will kick this machine out of the network by disabling read/write access to this machine ... pretty cool eh?
This same point was talked about later during the Server Demo and we were told that this part of the Server Policy system that Windows Server 2008 incorporates wherein you set the policies and you can either set a Do Not Allow or Restricted Access to the machine, now this is not only applicable to infected machines but Server Policies can be applied based on a wide range of options.
1 more highlight about Server was that lets say some one installed on all the machines on the network and a patch is released, now 1 the admin can put the patch on the server and all the machines can be updated automatically when ever they are logged onto the network
The plus point of Windows Server 2008 is that it saves 10% power under same load conditions as its previous version, something which was requested by a lot of customers.
IIS 7 was a feature of Server 2008 that was spoken about by Soma and also during the Server Demo. IIS7's great feature this time around is the Modular Installation method.
Part II to follow ...
the goodie bag also has a free edition of the Windows World Magazine recently launched
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